Reading Diary

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll (August 2007)

Curious.

I remembered that I’d seen a cartoon of this at my nan’s when I was young and, because a neighbour mentioned it and I couldn’t really remember it and I like reading the children’s classics that I never read as a child, I borrowed it from the library. I read it in three comfortable sittings.

It is a most peculiar story with no real storyline or aim (except getting to a garden). I suppose, like The Railway Children, it is more about a series of events or adventures. Alice, however, is nothing like Bobbie, Phylis and Peter. Actually, she reminds me somewhat of Loony Lovegood out of Harry Potter. She seems to have her head in the clouds and she has weird conversations with herself: when she first falls down the rabbit hole (a fall that goes on for ages) she asks herself in a calm and unconcerned manner something like: ’I wonder when this fall will ever end? If I come through to the other side of the earth, will I meet Australians? How will I know if it’s Australia? I expect there’ll be some signs about.’ She seems a bit loopy to me. Although, compared to the Madhatter, she seems somewhat sane.

The language is obviously old-fashioned, which is nice but I couldn’t get on with it as well as in The Railway Children. Carroll seems to like playing around with words and their different meanings and interpretations. I found this rather annoying and predictable but I suppose at the time it was written, it would have been quite a novel thing. The book has some interesting ideas in it however, such as swimming in your own tears, and having a disagreement with Time so that Time takes its revenge by making it always 6pm for you. However, early on in the book I had a thought which I now can’t escape from: these bizarre experiences have a great similarity to Beatles’ songs like Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds! I couldn’t get away from this link and whenever I read something silly in the book, I wondered if the Beatles had ever read it or what they’d have made of it.

I’m glad I read the book because it is one of the classics but I’m not sure that I’d recommend it to an adult unless they were reading it to a child; a child’s mind would go wild with imagination in Wonderland and would probably find the ‘funny’ bits funny, so for them I’m sure it’s a great book.

Forever Free: Elsa’s Pride – Joy Adamson (July – August 2007) 

I simply could not get into this one. It was a sort of fill-in book while I waited for Harry Potter 7 and waited to get to the shops to buy The Railway Children and, despite being determined to finish it, I still have two chapters left. It was just far too repetitive for me: We prepared the lions some meat and they came and ate it but one of the cubs was feeling off so he didn’t have any. Then they disappeared for the night and next morning we heard them roaring and went searching for them. This, or variations on this theme, is my main memory of the book. It’s like this all the way through. Alright, there are a few highlights: having to move the cubs from one place to another and the cubs being under threat in that new place etc. but still my memory is focused on the repetitive daily cycle.

The way it’s written is pretty plain too. It’s rather like each paragraph or section represents a short diary entry so no ‘adventure’ or ‘experience’ ever lasts long with enough detail. It seems very much like we’re racing through small insignificant events rather quickly but with no real story behind them. In fact, the actual story of the events could be summed up nicely in just a couple of pages. 

I hate to be so harsh but I want to be honest. Perhaps I’d have enjoyed it more if I’d seen the film(s).

The Railway Children – E. Nesbit (August 2007) 

What a wonderful book! There is almost nothing I could fault about it.

There is no great plot to The Railway Children. The only mystery is where the children’s father is. Instead, the story is all about their adventures by the railway and how they learn about themselves and life. This kind of storyline makes it an incredibly relaxing and pleasant read – just the ticket for bedtime reading or gentle reading out in the sunshine somewhere. I read the majority of the book on holiday, so it brings back happy memories of those locations – the caravan site, the seaside etc.

It is so well written too, I feel. Nesbit relates to her characters so well and helps us to do the same. She even talks to her audience e.g. when the children are making Perks’ birthday cakes she explicitly explains to the reader how to make icing. Other inspired sections of the prose include the one where she says something like ‘I hope you don’t mind my talking about Bobbie. I find her an interesting character and the more I get to know her the more I like her’. This makes it sound like she is simply reporting the events rather than making them up. Yet, brilliantly, she actually shows how she is in charge when she says something like ’I don’t think I’ll tell you the Old Gentleman’s name. It isn’t really necessary to the story’. The kind of relationship she strikes up with the reader works so well and is shown at its best in the last couple of pages, especially the last paragraph, which brought me close to tears. The language is beautiful throughout the story.

My copy of the book even had a couple of full page drawings per chapter, which added to this charming and delightful narrative. I would love to find a special edition of some sort to buy. A good quality hardback with colour pictures would make a lovely possession. Definitely one of my top ten books at the moment.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – J.K. Rowling (July 2007) 

I could write pages and pages on this but I will sum it up as best as I can. So many things that I thought would happen happened or otherwise were predictable as the book went on or alternatively did not come as a staggering shock or twist when they did occur. This was a bit of a shame because, with all the hype, I was expecting something spectacular although I don’t know what.

I was bitterly disappointed and backed Hermione to the hilt when Harry was convinced he needed to find the objects of a wizarding legend or fairy tale. The first thing that crossed my mind was someone saying ‘hey, do you really think Jack and the Beanstalk was true? Let’s go and see if the Beanstalk really exists.’ I asked myself ‘is this what a series of 6 books has come to in the end?’ However, as the pages turned I came to accept this part of the storyline and luckily it didn’t become the major plot line since the Horcruxes remained crucial.

From the chapter ‘The Prince’s Tale’, I started to become slightly confused. By the time of ‘King’s Cross’ and the episode in the Great Hall, I was beginning to lose it. I had to reread these chapters the day after I finished, skimming most parts but homing in on the sections that explained the plot. In my opinion, these were not well written; they seemed very muddled, even giving the impression that J.K. might not have got her head around some parts of the plot or the way in which to present them. A colleague at the bookshop, who is in charge of our Sci-fi and Fantasy section, said Rowling was not a good writer when compared to other fantasy authors. (Interestingly, he also said that she had lifted many aspects of the story from other fantasy books). I defended her at the time but find myself struggling more now. My confusion about these last chapters was reflected in the internet forums (end of July 2007) where others also believed that some areas remained unsatisfactorily explained.

The part that I struggled with most was the Elder Wand. I had to return to the book a third time to pick out the relevant sections and even returned to the Half-Blood Prince to find out exactly what had happened between Draco and Dumbledore at the top of the tower. I managed to work this out (although some on the forums have managed to interpret it differently). I still have one problem though and I don’t seem to be able to find a real answer as yet. I even asked a work colleague, who is in charge of our Children’s section and was raving about the book with a massive grin, for an answer and she admitted that she hadn’t even picked up on the problem before, which goes as follows: what was Dumbledore’s intention regarding the Elder Wand? In King’s Cross (p.578) Harry says ‘If you planned your death with Snape, you meant him to end up with the Elder Wand, didn’t you?’ ‘I admit that was my intention,’ said Dumbledore, ‘but it did not work as I intended, did it?’ I can understand this because Draco disarmed Dumbledore in the tower, thus winning the Elder Wand’s allegiance before Snape even got a look-in. However, when Harry is trying to explain everything to Tom Riddle in the Great Hall (p.594), why does he then say this: ‘Aren’t you listening? Snape never beat Dumbledore! Dumbledore’s death was planned between them! Dumbledore intended to die undefeated, the wand’s last true master! If all had gone as planned, the wand’s power would have died with him, because it had never been won from him!’ So what did Dumbledore really want; for the wand to ‘die’ with him or for Snape to have it? Perhaps I’ll find something in those last chapters that will help explain this the next time I read it.

Did you not find it weird how, after 6 years of trying to work out whether Snape was a goody or a baddy and an entire book devoted to him rather than Voldemort in the sixth, he only really appeared in the opening and closing chapters of this book?

The only other thing that annoyed me was the pre-meditated way in which all of the characters and locations were brought back during the book. I suppose J.K. felt obliged to do this, especially for the kids who would be hoping for one last look at characters like Grawp and Firenze but unnecessarily reintroducing these characters seemed to detract from the plot and only emphasise the thought that ‘this is the last book so let’s allow everyone to take their final bows’.

It also seemed odd how, when Bill was attacked by Greyback in book 6, there were detailed explainations of his physical appearance, the problems he might face in the future and people’s reactions to the event. Then, in book 7, characters of much greater importance i.e. Lupin were just found dead on the floor, without any real explanation and were barely mentioned again.

All this said, it was a good book, especially the first 550 pages, and I did enjoy it. I especially liked seeing the characters more mature and it was a nice change to experience life outside of Hogwarts. The revelation of Dumbledore’s past was interesting as was Kreacher’s tale. I also enjoyed visiting Godric’s Hollow and learning more about Harry’s family. However, it was by no stretch of the imagination the best of the seven books and due to the confused ending, may even rank as one of the bottom two or three in my chart.

I appreciate that other people may feel quite different but wouldn’t life be boring if we all thought the same?

Somewhere in Time – Richard Matheson (July 2007)

I decided to read this one because I watched the film with Adele in April and promised myself to read it soon. I borrowed it from the library in May and had a £4.50 fine on it before I’d even started reading it a couple of weeks ago. The pressure was on to enjoy it – I could almost have bought it for that price.

It’s written in the first person, which is great because it’s personal but the first quarter of the book (at least) is written as the transcript of tape-recorded diary. Thus you have to put up with about 60 pages of this:

The traffic is thickening as I enter San Diego proper. Got to get out of it. Isn’t there a place called Sea World down here? Think so. See a whale jump through a hoop. Downtown. Getting hemmed in. Billboards popping up like toadstools. Just past four o’clock. I’m getting nervous.

It’s difficult to keep going and I would have given up if I hadn’t seen the film and known what was coming. When the character eventually reaches the hotel, the main location of the story, and then travels back in time, he uses the written word to convey his story, which uses full sentences and is much more readable.

Another negative is that it is a long time into the story before the main character Richard Collier travels back in time (p.90 out of 250 pages) and up to this point you have to endure a lot of his research about the women he is time-travelling to meet, Elise McKenna (including his aching to be with her), and his findings on the methods of time-travel.

Speaking of time-travel, I very much like the method used in this book. There is no stupid machine that flashes and spins, trying to convince you it is moving through time; it is simply about your state of mind. In some ways this is less convincing, in other ways more so. What is brilliant about this however, is the way that it works with Richard’s terminal illness. Nobody really believes what he did. They think he hypnotised himself or that it was all a delusion brought on by his brain tumor and emotional needs in the face of death.

The film is quite different to the book in that Richard does not have a terminal illness. There is no question of his sanity or the truth of the story and in the end he dies from a broken heart. The book, however, seems a lot more realistic and rather complex.

The film is also rather inferior to the book because it does not explain things and it misses out whole chunks of storyline like why Elise accepts Richard. When I watched the film the other night, it really felt like they were racing through the story and I could not believe how much they were missing out.

Despite the idea behind the story being great and well thought out, to me, the book doesn’t seem all that well written. There seems to be too much emphasis on things like describing the room and you can kind of drift during these passages because the plot is not moving forward. Also, there seems to be too much detail in certain aspects of the story. For example, Richard is taken away by two men in the book, beaten up and left in a shed. This episode goes on for pages, with descriptions of his every thought and attempt to escape. Also, something that becomes “cringeably” annoying is Richard’s far-to-frequent declarations of his need to be with Elise: if he is away from her for more than an hour, he can’t stop going on about his desire to be with her again. However, if you manage to get over these annoyances, a good story lies beneath and by the time I’d finished it I felt I had been totally transported into the story and even felt an emptiness as I wondered what to do without this book – I had read it for a hour or two each day for a week.

With everything I’ve thought and said about this book, I’m left at a bit of a loose end and I’m rather confused by it. It is definitely a good story but I don’t much like the first third of it and I don’t feel it is particularly well written. And I can’t honestly say that I’d recommend it to anyone. Yet, for me there was something special about it. The night that I finished it, I couldn’t stop myself from watching the film again. It was often a page turner, especially in the middle and towards the end and the storyline certainly captured me. Despite plenty of opportunities I haven’t taken it back to the library yet – I can’t bring myself to do it for some reason. Thus, I’ve questioned myself about buying my own copy on the net. I’ve even found the music of Rachmaninov and John Barry (that is used in the film) to listen to and have endeavoured without success to find Mahler’s ninth symphony first movement, which is the music mentioned throughout the book and has great importance to the storyline. 

So anyway, I don’t really know what to make of it all. I suppose you’ll have to read it and decide for yourself sometime.

Harry Potter 1-6 – J. K. Rowling (April – July 2007)