The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton

Another book closer to having read the entire BBC Big Read list. The last is proving elusive, but I will track it down. This one was kindly loaned to me by John, courtesy of his son. Ninety-nine down. One to go. 

So, I remember reading a fair number of Enid Blyton books when I was younger - the Noddy books in particular, but also some of the Famous Five. I remember enjoying them, but not much detail remains. This, of course, is of an entirely different universe than those books, and it has all the elements of a charming, whimsical children's fantasy. What it doesn't have is an overarching plot.

I try not to be too demanding of children's books, except when I think I should be even more demanding because children deserve good books, dammit! This is a book of charming little episodes, and that's fine, and scarcely revolutionary for a children's book. However, my favourite childrens' books, even if they are episodic, have something to tie the overarching story together. 

We have four children, because there are almost always four children. Two boys and two girls, again, nothing new. (Except the girls are very thinly drawn - the two boys I can remember, but I retain almost nothing of the two girls' personalities, and I'm not really sure they had any. Disappointing, coming from a female author.)

Three of the children are siblings, and the fourth is their cousin Rick, who is staying with them for the summer. Rick is greedy and apt to get them into trouble. He doesn't listen as carefully to the rules of magic as the other three. 

The three siblings have a secret (and interestingly, in this series, the adults know about and interact with the magic beings the children have befriended.) It's a magic tree, populated by Moon Face, and a pixie-type named Silky, and Old Saucepan, who hangs saucepans all over his body. There's also a washerwoman fairy who empties her water down the tree, and an Angry Pixie, and probably a third. The real magic, however, lies at the top of the tree, where the very tip pokes into the roving magical lands that float about (presumably on clouds) and which the children can visit. But only for a little while, or the land might move off and they'll be trapped!

There is a Land of Presents, and a Land of Do-As-You-Please, and a Land of Topsy-Turvy, where people walk on their hands. Several times, the children get arrested for breaking the rules of whatever land they are in, through ignorance or thoughtlessness. 

All is not always well in the Lands above. Some people would rather live in the Magic Faraway Tree, like the Woman who Lives in a Shoe (and really wants to get away from her children) or the people from the Land of Tempers. In both cases, they try to steal the homes of Moonface and Saucepan and Silky and have to be tricked away.

It's not that any of these vignettes are bad. It's just that I want something to link them together. There's an episode where they are going to get a medicine for their sick mother, but a) she's not really that sick, and b) her being sick is just confined to that one chapter. The comparison that came to mind is The Magician's Nephew, where Digory's mother is not only ill, she's probably dying, and his worry about her colours the entire book. It's for around the same age range, and I think kids can follow an overarching plot perfectly easily. This book is charming, but it's missing something.

The Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot

The things I do to complete you, BBC Big Read list. Like read this book. This was totally not up my alley, another one that's on the list because people can agree most on books they liked as children and young adults. As we get older, our tastes get stronger, and we diversify. It means we can virtually all love Harry Potter, but when you read The Princess Diaries as a 38-year old married academic, there is all the eyerolling.

It's not the subject matter. Girl finds out she's a princess when her father's testicular cancer means he'll never have another shot at fathering a child, and so his bastard daughter is the only possible heir to the throne. (I'm not kidding, but that explanation kind of worked for me.) I mean, it's total fairy tale, but I like fluff sometimes.

When it's done well. What I don't like is lazy fluff. Like having an inconsistent main character. She hates fashion. She wears Doc Martens and overalls and doesn't want to dress up or care about fashion - and yet, when she's making a list for her grandmother of her top ten most admired women, the first two are on the list because they're fashionable. Could you make up your mind, Meg Cabot?

And the slang! It's straight out of Clueless, and I mean straight out of Clueless. I'd never seen anyone else refer to pretty women as Betties before, and there was another related piece of slang that's left my mind. The problem here is that Clueless is charming, and stylized and so, so Valley Girl. I am not sure that rich kids in New York are using the same slang. It was jarring, and left me wondering seriously about Meg Cabot's sources. Clueless for what the kids are saying these days? Really?

At any rate, we also have the main romantic plotline from Clueless where the girl realizes that instead of the pretty boy she's been pining over, what she really needs to do is notice the guy she's known best all along, and find love there. It can be done, and it can be done well. But here it's so obvious and creaky.

Mia is fine as a main character, for someone who is totally inconsistent and never for a moment thinks "hey, cool, I'm a princess." I have no problem with it becoming painfully and quickly obvious all the things that would suck about being royalty, but there's not one moment? Not even one?

It's about how she gets along at school once she knows and keeps it hidden, and how that changes when suddenly everyone knows and all the cool kids want to be her friend and take her to dances and get on the cover of the newspaper. And yeah, I'm probably being too nitpicky. But I didn't come to this book when I was a teenager. (It is not the sort of thing I would have been reading then anyway.) I came to it far too late in life, and now I have slogged through it and am three books from finishing the BBC Big Read. Phew!

The BBC Big Read

I read a lot of books, and a lot of different books. I like to mix it up, and draw from a bunch of different sources. One of those sources is the BBC Big Read list, which I am getting very close to being done. I started it because my sister had read many more on the list than I had, and I'm just a teensy bit competitive. Now I'm winning!

Thoughts on this list: obviously a lot of books that have the popular support to win a list like this are children's books, classics, and a certain kind of bestseller. Overall, though, I've enjoyed a lot of the books I've read on it!

Many of the books on this list I read before I started writing reviews, but I've added links to the ones I have written. (unread) marks those few I still have left to go!

The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - J.K. Rowling
To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Winnie-The-Pooh - A.A. Milne
1984 - George Orwell
The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis de Bernieres
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone - J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets - J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - J.K. Rowling
The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
Tess of the d'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
Middlemarch - George Eliot
A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
The Story of Tracy Beaker - Jacqueline Wilson
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Pillars of the Earth - Ken Follett
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson
A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
Persuasion - Jane Austen
Dune - Frank Herbert
Emma - Jane Austen
Anne of Green Gables - L.M. Montgomery
Watership Down - Richard Adams
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Animal Farm - George Orwell
A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
Far From the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
Goodnight, Mister Tom - Michelle Magorian
The Shell Seekers - Rosamunde Pilcher
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
The Stand - Stephen King
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
The BFG - Roald Dahl
Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
Black Beauty - Anna Sewell
Artemis Fowl - Eoin Colfer
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Noughts and Crosses -  Malorie Blackman
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
The Thorn Birds - Colleen McCullough
Mort by Terry Pratchett
The Magic Faraway Tree - Enid Blyton (unread)
The Magus - John Fowles
Good Omens - Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
Guards! Guards! - Terry Pratchett
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Perfume - Patrick Suskind
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists - Robert Tressell
Night Watch - Terry Pratchett
Matilda - Roald Dahl
Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
Ulysses - James Joyce
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
Double Act - Jacqueline Wilson
The Twits - Roald Dahl
I Capture The Castle - Dodie Smith
Holes - Louis Sachar
Gormenghast - Mervyn Peake
The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
Vicky Angel - Jacqueline Wilson
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
Magician - Raymond E. Feist
On the Road - Jack Kerouac
The Godfather - Mario Puzo
The Clan of the Cave Bear - Jean M. Auel
The Colour of Magic - Terry Pratchett
The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho
Katherine - Anya Seton
Kane and Abel - Jeffrey Archer
Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Girls in Love - Jacqueline Wilson (unread)
The Princess Diaries - Meg Cabot
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie (unread)

Katherine by Anya Seton

When I started reading this book, my husband looked at the cover and asked if I'd picked it to read based on that alone. I used to have this poster over my bed before we moved in together, then later, above the couch in our living room. I said no, as I'd had no idea what the cover would be when I went to pick it up. But it is a nice piece of synchronicity.

Of course, the significance of The Accolade to the story of Katherine Swynford is perhaps tenuous. She never knighted anyone, never ruled anyone, is important in as much as she is because of her proximity to power, not the official wielding of it. But perhaps I'm being pedantic.

The reason I did pick this book up is because it's on the BBC Big Read, which I believe I am now about 5 books from finishing in its entirety. It doesn't surprise me, therefore, that this is a historical romance about Katherine Swynford, long-term mistress to John of Gaunt, father of Henry IV.

I'd be interested to read more about Katherine. While I believe Seton has done a lot of research on the dates and events, her Katherine's character is one that I would like to know if the evidence in any way supports. As she stands in this novel, she's not interested in power, or politics. She just wants her lover and to hide away from the eyes of the world, frequently wracked with religious guilt over her sinning.

Looking at the wiki entry, looks like at least one book has been written about her as a mover behind the scenes, which might be more interesting than this guilt-wracked lover. She's remarkably powerless in this, and while women had less and different access to power in this period, it doesn't mean they're utterly helpless. Katherine in this book is irritatingly so, at times.

It also brings the reason she and John of Gaunt have a long affair and eventually marry when his wife dies down to sheer physical attraction, which is great to start, but there had to have been more once the fires had been banked for the night.

Still, it's not a bad read, and it's fun to run into Geoffrey Chaucer. The practicality with which the people involved regard marriage are interesting, as is the overall sense of grime to the world, leavened by the relatively easier lives of the extremely well-off nobles. If you're looking for historical romance, I think you could certainly do worse.

However, the main character is just so angsty and powerless. It's a choice, to make her whole life be about whether or not she gets to sleep with John of Gaunt, but the author's choice to take her out of all but one of the major events of the times, for her to be content to never ever know what her lover's doing, or how it might affect her until she's forced to...it just feels like a missed opportunity. There's definitely an interesting story here. There's just that little voice in the back of my head that tells me this book would have been better if there had been some speculating on oblique ways of influencing the course of events. She calms him down once. Was that all she ever did?

Read as part of the BBC Big Read

Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel

People will lie to you about this book. They don't realize that they're lying, but they are. I said I was reading this as part of my almost-finished effort to read the BBC Big Read list, and everyone I came across said "Wow, is there ever a lot of sex in that book!"

What they mean is, apparently, there is a lot of sex in the series. There is not a lot of sex in this book. Every hundred pages, I would announce to someone that there had been no Neanderthal sex yet, and feel a little more disappointed. I didn't know if it would be well-written Neanderthal sex, but I was interested to find out. Then the one sex scene in this entire book came, around page 400, and it was ugly and nonconsensual. Thanks, everyone. Way to make that as awkward and upsetting as possible.

So, if you're reading this book? There is no consensual sex in it. People then backtracked to tell me that oh, it's the later books that have all the good sex in them, but that was not in time to make this book anymore fun. You have been warned where I was not.

Outside of the sex? Well, this is okay. There are a lot of assumptions about Neanderthal culture, but I'm sure that would be the case in any book, as we know so very little. I am not entirely convinced by the notion that the Neanderthals were incapable of changing even a little, particularly when it's presented as these dark hairy people who are bettered at every turn by the blonde blue-eyed Ayla.

Ayla is a bit of a Mary Sue. I know that's an overused term, and there are lots of reasons to hate it. But she's good at everything. She's the best medicine woman they've ever seen. She's the best sling hunter they've ever seen. She's one of the best toolmakers they've ever seen. She's the only one to ever survive a month-long death curse. She's the only one to hide with her baby and survive, weak from childbirth. She's practically a shaman herself. She puts together the connection between sex and pregnancy all by herself, the first person in human history to do so. They have to declare her an honorary man in order to integrate her into their society. Her arms are better set in her body, her hair is prettier, her brain is bigger, she can talk more easily, she's a freaking Aryan portent of doom for the Neanderthals.

Why is she blonde, anyway? The earliest human the Neanderthals meet, the literal herald of their doom (as the shaman discovers), and she's as blonde and white as blonde and white can be.

I'm perhaps being a bit unfair - The Clan of the Cave Bear is entertaining, and it wasn't a difficult read, although some of the descriptions of the primordial caves and forests could be a bit much. I'm sure the sex gets more fun, at least I hope it does. I'm just getting sick of reading these books that people rave to me about as fun books for women, rife with sex, and then sitting down and getting rape instead. I'm looking at you too, Outlander.

It's not bad. It's just maddening, particularly since most of the book is watching Ayla getting beaten down, over and over, by the one Neanderthal who hates her. I have my own ideas of fun popular fiction. That's not really it.

Read as part of the BBC Big Read

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling

I feel a little strange reviewing this. I mean, it's been out forever, I've read it more times than I care to count, own the movie, and everyone and their sister has read the book, and I'm sure the number of reviews number in the thousands. It came up as a reread for me recently, and so I'll take a crack.

Let's start off by saying that I worked in a bookstore when this book came out, and I remember it clearly. The Harry Potter books had been gaining steam as a phenomenon in the months leading up to it, but this was the first new release that was An Event. (These, of course, would go on to be more and more Big Events, but this was the first one.) At the time, I had no idea what the hype was, except that we were moving more and more of these books.

My husband read them first, and then read me the first one out loud, and let me tell you, his Hagrid voice is something you want to hear. One of my biggest regrets about this series is that I was too impatient to let him read me any of the others - I plowed through each as soon as I could get them home.

So we were on the Harry Potter bandwagon fairly early. Rereading Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was like slipping back into a pair of comfortable pajamas. It's the book right before the deaths start happening, although we're getting eased into how difficult the endings of some of the future books will be already. The end of the book dwells in great detail on the murders of Harry's parents, and the betrayals that led up to them.

It was the first sentence that reminded me how much I like these books - much has been justifiably made of Rowling's tight plotting over the series, but I'd also like to note that that woman can rock an opening sentence. The rest of the book unfolded just as I remembered it, only marred by the fact that the binding is disintegrating on my hardcover, and part of the experience of rereading it was juggling to keep the pages together.

I don't know what else I have to say. It's the first appearance of Sirius, who is such a wonderful character. And Lupin, which, ditto. It's hard to separate them in my head now from the actors who took on the roles in the movies, but they were both great choices, so I'm happy with that. Details laid down books before pay off, like the reason behind having a Whomping Willow on campus.

Finally, they actually get to play through a Quidditch cup. This so rarely happens.

My husband is working on a Fate: Accelerated Harry Potter hack at the moment, and that's not why I went back and picked this one up again, but it has been a great experience. There are those books that you can pick up and slip right back into and enjoy every moment, and I am pleased to say that I haven't found a Harry Potter book about which that isn't true.

Read many times, but once as part of the BBC Big Read
It was also one of the Hugo Nominees 

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

People recommend books to me a lot. It's hard to know when or how to fit them all in! And then there's the worry I won't like a book that is very dear to a dear friend's heart. For a long time, I just avoided reading books that had been recommended to me, unless someone pushed a physical copy into my hot little hands. (This is still the fastest way to get a book to the top of my list.) So I started a new list from which to pick, of books friends recommended. If you want to get in on this, you can recommend a book on this post.

This book was recommended to me by Téa.

I had read The Great Gatsby before, but it was long before I started writing reviews. In fact, the first time I ever read it was for my grade 10 English class. I can't say I remembered much about it, but that's true for a lot of books I read in high school English, with a few notable exceptions.  I read it again a couple of years ago, and here I am now, ready to try to review a classic. It's a little daunting.

This was also the first book I read on our iPad, because I couldn't find my paper copy of it when I went looking, and it was free. As far as I could tell, it was the full text. It's not the first thing I've read on a reader, it just meant I had to wrest the iPad out of my husband's hands every time I wanted to sit down with it.

And now I've put the review off long enough. So, what did I think of The Great Gatsby? It's a great book, obviously. The writing is beautiful and poignant. The characters are, by far and large, irritating rich people, and their follies are worked out through pain for other people.

I'm sure you all know the story. Nick, the narrator, moves in next door to Party Central, Jay Gatsby's house, a man with all the wealth in the world and a million stories about how he got it. His raucous parties mean little to Gatsby himself, though. He's only concerned about attracting the attention of Daisy, who lives across a narrow strip of water, his sweetheart before he went off to war.

Daisy is married to a rich asshole, Tom, who in the tradition of rich assholes everywhere, thinks that he has little power, and is worried about all those uppity non-white people getting a piece of his pie. There was a lot about this book that made me sigh and think how little has changed. The dude with all the physical power, all the money, all the ability to cheat on his wife and beat his mistress and do whatever he wants, he thinks he's powerless. He thinks those damned poor people and those damned immigrants are out to rob him of his rightful...well, whatever his "rightful" is is never defined. But it feels threatened, dammit! And that justifies...well, whatever he wants!

People keep saying that income inequality is approaching or has surpassed the era in which Fitzgerald was writing, and this isn't the main point of his book, but it's a little eerie to see the same kind of denial of privilege coming out of the mouth of the character with the most power.

I know very little about formal criticism of this book, but you hear about it as a critique of the Jazz Age, but what I was struck with this time was how virtually every character we know is actually from the Midwest, transplanted to the outskirts of New York City. Do we see native New Yorkers? Maybe Tom's mistress' sister, and a few people at that party, but they don't make much of an impression.

It's hard to come up with a coherent review of The Great Gatsby. I'm sure a million have been written. But every time I read it, I come up with something different to think about. That right there is the mark of a classic.

Also read as part of the BBC Big Read

Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer

I enjoyed this more than I expected too, coming right on the heels of reading one of the Percy Jackson books, which are okay, but nothing special. (Sometimes the universe just throws books at me in clumps like that. Or, to be more precise, the London public library system.)

This one felt more inventive than the Rick Riordan books, and I enjoyed the playing with fairy legends and weaving them together into something that was very enjoyable to read. I also appreciated that the 12-year-old protagonist was a 12-year-old genius and super-criminal. Artemis still verged a tiny bit on being precious at times, but most of the time, was thoroughly enjoyable as a character.

Artemis, having lost his father in a mysterious boat explosion, and his mother to grief over losing his father, is trying to rebuild the family criminal empire. Being a twelve year old, he is more receptive to ideas that adults might dismiss, and discovers that a) fairies do indeed exist and b) they have a lot of gold.

So he sets out to capture one, but it ends up being part of the elite LEPRecon team, and the first female member at that.

This book wasn't deep, but it did create a sense of sheer enjoyment in the world Eoin Colfer was creating, and the delight of discovery.

Read as part of The BBC Big Read

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

 
This is a reread review. A many, many times reread. I really don't think I could count - the Roald Dahl books are part of the wallpaper of my childhood, and I reread books I loved over and over then.

My husband says that this and the Great Glass Elevator are the only two Roald Dahl books he's ever read, which slightly terrifies me. And must be rectified, immediately.

But this is the one that I think most people are likely to have read - although I have to tell you, when I bought a used copy last week and took it over to a coffee shop to read, the woman serving me looked at the book, and asked brightly "Is that a good book?"

Yes, I said. Yes, it is. You should read it.

But on to the actual book. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a wonderful story, full of whimsy and delight, but undercut with tones of poverty and despair, which makes the lightness of the story show up in greater detail, and makes the eventual ending even more pleasurable.

There are also strong disapproving undertones of "kids these days" with their gluttony and gum-chewing and tv-watching and being spoiled. None of the other children knows what it is like to want, and so Charlie is the only child who has any self-restraint.

Class is, thus, a major theme in the book, and poor downtrodden Charlie the only character with morals or ethics. Poor boy makes good. And that's heartwarming, although at times on this particular reread, when I knew I was going to review it, the awfulness of every other child and parent in the book struck me as a little heavyhanded. But that's the way fairytales go, I guess. There is only one who can pass the tests and display goodness and kindness.

But I am doing a disservice to the book's prose if I don't mention it here, strongly. The writing is wonderful, the songs amusing, the joy in creating drips through every line.

Thank you for so much of my childhood, Roald Dahl. Even if The Witches did scar me for life.

Read many, many times, but once as part of the BBC Big Read

The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough

Oh, these books, these books that are hugely popular and overwrought and, well, interesting, but not enough to really grab me. I never resented reading this book, it moved along quickly, but in the end? I'm not sure it had anything that really took possession of me while I was reading it, nor anything that will really stick with me.

Reading The Thornbirds was part of my long-term attempt to read the BBC Big Read list, and perhaps because of that, this and The Shell Seekers are linked in my mind, since they both appear on the list. They're both sprawling stories of women who can never be with the man they love. The characterization of the less-likeable characters was better in the Thornbirds than it was in The Shell Seekers, who had real caricatures for the children born by the wrong man. But the loveable characters in The Shell Seekers were more strongly drawn, drawing me in to the story in a way that I didn't really feel with the Thorn Birds.

Love and loss on the Australian plains. Wanting someone you can never have. Losing everything, simply because you love it. These are the major themes of the book, and they're just too...overt for me. I prefer a bit of subtlety, not being whacked over the head repeatedly that THIS SHOULD EVOKE EMOTION.

Sometimes I think I dig in my heels at those moments and think "You can't tell me how to feel!" Possibly just part of my overall stubbornness.

So, for me, The Thornbirds was fun to read, once. But it'll only be once. It's a sprawling family story, of the sort I usually enjoy, but there wasn't enough there to draw me back in a second time.

Oh, and another comparison with The Shell Seekers, which is something I didn't like very much in either of them - they both buy entirely into the idea of the maternal imagination. When pregnant by the "wrong man," the pregnancies are terrible (not because of stress, but because it's the wrong semen?), and the children are strange. Even if the mothers bring them up lovingly, they are strange and different (The Thorn Birds) or selfish and greedy (The Shell Seekers.) On the other hand, being pregnant by the "right man" creates a child that is fantastic in every way. Nothing needs to be done by them, that right-guy sperm and the maternal imagination creates a child that, by the time they pop out, are already sparkling specimens of humanity.

I'm not fond of this "marked before birth to be unlikeable" stuff.

Read as part of The BBC Big Read

Magician: Apprentice by Raymond E. Feist

What to say about this book? I get why it has been popular. It's well-written, the characters are good, the story bounces along.... Except for the part where there's nearly nothing really striking about it. It's good, but I can't think of a single category in which it ascends to greatness. So I'm left having enjoyed reading it, but not in any way enthused about Feist's writing or reading more. (I will read the second half, so I can check this off on the BBC Big Read, though.)

It's hard to write about a book that is really very skillful generic fantasy, but still absolutely generic fantasy. I get that this may have been one of the groundbreaking works - was it? - but now this is ground that has been retread so many times that all I'm getting from reading it is a Tolkien-homage. Not as close a Tolkien homage as some others, but Tolkien's world drips all over these pages.

The idea of a fantasy world being invaded by another fantasy world is interesting, and that's the premise of the books, as warriors from another dimension keep popping up and attacking, possibly trying to create beach-heads for a full invasion.

There are courtly politics around this, and a young emperor who is sitting happily in denial about anything going on for as long as he can.

The two viewpoint characters are two young men, one a warrior-in-training, the other a magician-in-training. The magician has magic the likes of which have not been seen in ages, or perhaps ever.

He's in love with the princess of the place where he lives, or rather, she's in love with him, and he's not quite sure how he feels.

I am running out of things to say already. There isn't an urgent dramatic push in this book. It meanders through an invasion, and the tension is rarely high. In fact, as far as I can remember, no named characters die, so the stakes are certainly not as high as they are in, say, a George R.R. Martin book, which has perhaps spoiled this kind of high fantasy for me.

The female character gets to be tempestuous and spoiled, and later to mellow, and discover that she likes it when the guy she has feelings for orders her around to keep her safe. Even if she doesn't always listen. 

There are dwarves, and elves, and a dragon sleeping on his hoard. There are master magicians. The evil all comes from elsewhere. It's a fun read, but it just...it doesn't seem to have anything more to say.

Read as part of the BBC Big Read

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

I finished The God of Small Things yesterday, and decided to sleep on it before I tried to write a review, hoping that might make it clear what I wanted to say.

And I still don't know. I don't know what I thought about this book. I didn't love it - it's not one I'll rush out and tell all my friends about. Yet it was full of felicitous turns of phrase that I enjoyed very much.

The God Of Small Things is about a family in India in the mid-twentieth century (if my quick wikipedia search about Indian communism leads me to guess the right time period), their wounds, the things they say and don't say, the ways they conform to expectations and defy them, and the consequences, both direct and sudden and unexpected.

The story is very much a spiral around a tragedy, circling in tighter and tighter until the complete picture is revealed, which in the early book is hinted at, but it takes time before different elements interconnect.

And through the spiral cuts the straight line of malice from one character who acts with such petty viciousness that it turns a tragedy into a monstrosity.

This novel is full of damaged characters, all of whom were touched by at least one of the two major events, none of whom has fully come to terms with their actions or inactions. Anything Can Happen To Anyone, and does.

And yet, this is a small story, told by the God of Small Things, with the larger societal and political tragedies populating the background. In a way, the small things that happen in the book happen because of the Large Things, yet they are important to the characters because of their immediate impact, not their larger significance. And none of them can move past the Small Things. And so, in a way, they absent themselves from the Big Things, in ways that remove them from active participation in the world. (Estha's silence, Rahel's remoteness, Baby Kochamma's TV, Chacko's emigration, Ammu's eventual fate.)

This is a difficult book. It isn't light. But it does reward thought. And I think I liked it more than I realized.

Read as part of the BBC Big Read

Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake

How to rate this one? Three stars or four? Well, I'm unlikely to read this again, so I guess three. Or am I? Maybe I'll try it again some day. Four?

I find the Gormenghast books a bit exhausting, and they fall under the category of books that I respect, but that I don't particularly like. The characters are all too distant, the writing too ornate, the world too much like a painting by someone who can capture moments, but not depth of feeling.

And yet I found the second volume slightly more accessible than the first, and will go on to read the third at some point, because I'm just stubborn that way. At least there was an identifiable drive to Gormenghast - Titus' rebellion against Gormenghast itself, its ritual, its physical form, and its inhabitants. But given that, even to Titus himself, the other characters exist less as actual people and more as reminders of his own psyche, I find it hard to care about them, and by extension, him.

Peake's character sketches are amusing, but somewhere around the two hundred page mark, I start to want something more.

And yet the word pictures that all that ornate writing creates are striking. There are turns of phrase that leave me breathless. I just wish they added up into something a little bit more. Thousands of words are spilt on Irma Prunesquallor's search for a husband, the party at which that happens, and the first meeting of her and her future husband. And then...they disappear. Except for a couple of brief mentions.

I like sprawling stories about lots of characters, but it's a delicate juggling act to move between them. With Peake, it's more like he hurls one ball at a time directly at the reader, and then forgets it exists, except when, on occasion, it nudges his foot as it rolls back.

Read as part of the BBC Big Read

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

A quick easy book as I'm nearing the end of the BBC's Big Read. Down to fewer than ten books to go, now. This particular list has been something I've been slowly working my way through for the last three or four years, and the end is in sight. I thoroughly enjoyed this entry. It's light but amusing, with entertaining commentary on other literature. I finished it quickly, and have taken a while to get to the review, as I had one weekend two weekends ago where I finished five books. I'm almost caught up.

Cold Comfort Farm is a book about what happens if you take a family of overwrought literary characters from the moors (think Wuthering Heights) and plunk down amongst them a cheerful, thoroughly practical modern young woman, and see what can be done by merely looking at the drama and saying "well, really, isn't this ridiculous!"

It reminded me a bit of that Jasper Fforde section where Thursday Next goes to visit the Wuthering Heights anger management classes. But where those characters could not be pulled out of their grooves, Flora is quite successful.

Flora is an orphan. She has a modest income, but instead of finding a job, she decides that the thing to do is to find a relative with whom she can live, and be an amusing companion to. The only relative to bite at this offer is a family out on the moors, whose very letters drip with overwrought emotion. She arrives, to find a family in constant turmoil. A great-aunt who rules them all with an iron fist despite appearing batty. A mother obsessed with one son at the cost of the other. A religious fanatic. A son who sleeps around with a lot of women, despite his real passion being the movies. Another son who loves the farm itself with passion that would otherwise be reserved for women. An uncontrolled daughter of the moors, in love with the local squire's son. A farmhand who thinks the muskrats (or some other small rodent) promised him the daughter of the moors as his bride in her cradle.

All of them are in the grip of their emotions, and have not let their common sense work in quite a long time. Flora breezes in, and the humour contrasts her to these stock literary characters, but also compares the styles of writing, as the prose is alternately light and breezy, and heavy and portentous.

Can Flora straighten out her relatives?

What's going on here is in no way revolutionary. Instead, it's like sitting down to tea and conversation with a witty friend, and just enjoying yourself without thought for whether or not that conversation means something, or will change your life.

Flora and her interactions with the young man in love with the farm particularly amused me, as every time she speaks on it, he assumes she's trying to steal the farm out from under his feet and starts ranting. Her way of undercutting him is charming.

The commentary on a certain genre of English rural fiction is quite hilarious, and Flora, in her officious and determined interference, a welcome commentary.

Read as part of the BBC Big Read

Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett

There is a kind of book that is exactly the right thing to read when you got up at 5:20 AM to catch a bus to a conference, and have since, without having a nap, listened to six academic papers, and need something to read while eating and before bed.

But which can't be taxing in any way. Preferably light.

This is that kind of book.

I normally enjoy Terry Pratchett without being terribly invested in his books. I've read a handful, enjoy them when I pick them up, rarely search out more.

This one, though. I can't tell if it's actually even better than that, or if that's the exhaustion talking. But I just enjoyed the heck out of Guards! Guards!, from the dissertations on secret societies, the ailments of swamp dragons, the peevishness of the continually overlooked, or the million-to-one-chance-that-might-just-work.

Anyway, a dragon appears, and flames oppressive vegetable shops, and the remnants of the Watch are joined by a new overachieving young human who thought he was a tall dwarf until recently, and find out that maybe it's worth upholding the Law after all. Although perhaps not healthy.

Read as part of the BBC Big Read

Double Act by Jacqueline Wilson

Oh, what I will read in the chase for that elusive and dubious honour of having read all the BBC's Big Read books. (I have 13 more to go!) If not for that, I probably never would have discovered Jacqueline Wilson - I missed these books when I was young, and they're not the sort of things I would have otherwise stumbled upon as an adult.

As children's/almost young adult books, they're fun. They tend to deal with real issues, but in an accessible way. In this case, two twins who are very different, but struggle against that. They're also dealing with the death of their mother and the new relationship of their father. These are all real issues. (The other one I read was about a girl in fostercare.) But for all that, they're fairly light, very fast reads, and while I wouldn't worry about kids reading them, they're not really deep.

But Ruby and Garnet are appealing. Ruby wants them to be actresses, but Garnet is terrified of getting up in front of people. Ruby hates their new life and new school, but Garnet starts to make friends. Ruby takes the lead, Garnet follows, even if she disagrees. And Ruby is so headstrong she tries to drag them into being actresses, without ever listening to her sister.

The characters are lightly drawn, but nicely complex. Their dad's new girlfriend is both exasperated and understanding. Their beloved grandmother is also a little nitpicky. Their dad is trying hard, but coming apart a bit at the seams. Nobody in this book is a monster, even the town bully.

And the twins eventually learn that maybe doing things apart isn't as bad as they thought. It's a good light read for children, but I don't know how long it would stay with them. When I think back on the books from my own childhood that have stayed with me, they're the ones that are more complex, that challenged me with ideas and adventures beyond the commonplace. I guess I never much cared for straight-up fiction as a child. That came much later.

Read as part of the BBC Big Read

Perfume by Patrick Suskind

A dreaded three-star review. They're the hardest books to review, the ones that didn't inspire me to glowing praise or angry ranting. I find it so hard to quantify, sometimes, why a book falls into the "meh" category. Something about it didn't grab me, but the author never made me angry, either.

So, Perfume. Three stars. Story of a serial killer, sort of. In France. In the 18th century. A boy is born with no scent, but the best nose in the world. Somehow, this makes him utterly disconnected from humanity. Or maybe he's just a born psychopath. Who knows? He rises to become a journeyman perfumier, but becomes obsessed with the scent of beautiful young virgins, and wants to bottle it. Hence, the killing.

Here's a question though - do beautiful people have a naturally better smell than non-beautiful people? The book certainly makes that equivalency, without comment. Every girl he kills is of a certain beautiful, buxom, just blossoming-into-womanhood type. I suppose, as a literary gimmick, the young virgin part might make sense (maybe), but why are they all beautiful? The author goes out of his way to tell us that Grenouille doesn't notice anything he sees, just what he smells. But somehow, everyone who smells beautiful, is beautiful. But why does A = B?

I found that jarring - wouldn't the threat of a serial killer be more profound if he didn't have a type, as visual senses would define it?

And I'm not that fond of serial killer-related writing. Only my quest to finish that bloody BBC Big Read list made me pick this one up. Perfume didn't give me the creeps, luckily, and I slept last night.

The world Suskind creates is interesting, the prose interesting, but in the end, it all seemed a little thin. What really does make him different from everyone else? Or even from other serial killers? Yes, he's fixated on smell. So?

Read as part of the BBC Big Read

Mort by Terry Pratchett

I've been reading Mort while I eat for the last week or so - it's just about the perfect level for that amount of attention. To the person I borrowed the book from, I promise I didn't get any food on it. I'm just trying to say something about Terry Pratchett. It's thoroughly enjoyable and light, and not particularly taxing. Perfect reading while eating.

This did make my experience of reading it rather choppy, though. While I enjoyed it, I didn't love it, and that might be as much a part of how I was reading as the book itself. Take that into consideration.

Death is looking for an apprentice. He picks Mort, who doesn't quite fit in with his family. He's too easily distracted, you see. Thinking big thoughts instead of getting stuff done. So when Death comes along to the apprentice's fair, Mort is ready to go with him. But being Death's apprentice isn't an easy task. Particularly when there's a beautiful princess next to have her thread cut....

Mort does a nice job of subverting narrative expectations. Mort is quite an intelligent young man, and less bumbling than well-meaning. And the adventure with the princess doesn't go quite the way we might have expected it to, given that set-up - and I think the ending we did get was much more satisfying.

Still, it does feel a little slight. I think, of all the Discworld books, I've responded most strongly to the Night Watch ones. The others I generally enjoy, but feel a little bit like something is lacking at the end. The story of Mort is definitely entertaining, but lacks a bit of that social commentary and bite that the Night Watch books have had. Or maybe it's later Pratchett vs. earlier? I don't know enough to know.

It is telling that I've already run out of things to say. This is fun, and it's light, and it gets me one more book closer to finishing the BBC's Big Read books. I'm glad I read it.

Read as part of the BBC Big Read

Vicky Angel by Jacqueline Wilson

Under normal circumstances, I don't know that I would ever have read Jacqueline Wilson. I didn't discover her during my childhood, and as an adult, I don't think this would really have become an author on my radar. Normal circumstances, however, do not take into consideration my extreme stubbornness and the existence of the BBC's Big Read List. Due to the two in conjunction, I think this is my third Wilson book. I have to say, while they probably aren't something I would have sought out even as a child, they're not bad.

What I think where they are strongest is the sense of complexity. There is a level on which these could be straightforward - the stories of a girl losing a best friend, or of a girl leaving foster care, or of being a twin. But Wilson does a nice job of layering other things on top of it, making the lives of her characters complicated in ways that feel very much more life.

So in this one, Jade suffers the lost of her best friend. But it isn't just a take on her grieving. Her parents are kind of jerks, at times, and have their own stuff going on. Her dead best friend's parents are similarly wrapped up in their own pain. Other kids at school have varying reactions to Jade as she negotiates her Vicky-less world.

Vicky runs out in front of a car after school one day, and is hit. She dies later that day. Her best friend, Jade, who long hid in Vicky's shadow, is suddenly without her rock. Her parents are less than helpful, telling her talking about it and asking for help are forms of weakness. (Although they may be saying so to cover that they can't pay for therapy, and are afraid others might say they aren't good parents.)

Jade joins the Fun Run club, which Vicky was convincing her to join right before she died, and stays away from the Drama Club, which is what she really wants to do. Vicky not only overshadows this book as an absence, she's an active character. Vicky's ghost, or at least, Jade's projection of one, hangs around Jade. (The book doesn't definitively come down on whether or not this is supernatural.) We get the feeling that Vicky wasn't always a particularly nice person, or at least, Jade's memory of her seems that way. How do we deal with the warts on people we love who have died?

This is what I think makes these books more than they could be. The complexity stands up nicely to the very simple prose, and balancing the two is by no means an easy task. But all the same, I can't say I love these books. I know they're obviously greatly loved by the BBC's reading public, since there are so many on the top list, and I get why childhood favourites are disproportionately represented there. Still, it feels like something's missing.

I don't know what it is. But this are interesting books, and for children struggling with difficult times, I think they're good enough not to be insulting. There's nothing worse than saccharine reassurances that everything will be fine. These books manage to come to reasonably happy endings without feeling like they're faking it.

Read as part of the BBC Big Read

Night Watch by Terry Pratchett

Somehow Terry Pratchett seems to go down particularly well when I'm not feeling at my best. I've read several that I've enjoyed but not been particularly grabbed by. In comparison, the times that I've read one of his books while sick or exhausted, I have liked them a whole lot more.

A few Christmases ago, the Christmas of the sick, when I ended up in the bathroom all night at my in-laws in absolute misery, I grabbed a couple of books from my mother-in-law's bookshelf. Let me tell you, sick and feverish at 3am is not the time to start Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere. It was, however, the perfect time to read Feet of Clay. I read Guards, Guards when I was sleep-deprived and at an academic conference. Both of them were the most enjoyable Pratchetts I'd read so far.

I started Night Watch when I was healthy, and was liking it, but not feeling particularly invested. Well, the universe decided to enhance the experience by smiting me with the cold from hell, and what do you know? Suddenly, I was right into it again.

Terry Pratchett - he's good for what ails ya.

Night Watch takes Sam Vimes, Duke, and plunks him back in a pivotal moment in the past, where he has to make sure that his younger self turns into a competent copper, keep the peace during an uprising, and track down a bloodthirsty criminal who was thrown back with him.

It took me some time to get up to speed (I have only read about 6 or 7 Discworld books, and all out of order, so there may be things I'm missing), but once the story started to really get into a groove, I was sniffling, and along for the ride.

Night Watch allows Pratchett some interesting observations on the nature of the law, enforcement, protest, and protection, funneled through Sam's perceptions. I enjoyed the bits that were reminiscent of the barricades in Les Miserables particularly, as well as the young Nobby sticking his nose into everything that's going on.

It may be the sickness talking, but this is another Terry Pratchett that went beyond simple liking, and into something more.

Read as part of the BBC Big Read