Tag: books

Quick book picks for April

fiendfullyreading

With a whole load of books out this month, it was actually hard to pick out some recommendations. These are a mixed bunch aimed at a variety of audiences, but not limited to those audiences. Click on the title links to full reviews for more details.

  • I Still Dream by James Smythe – A novel about a girl who builds an AI to listen to her problems and how that AI becomes so much more, but also stays as her personal friend and confidant. Proof that books about tech can also be about memory, loss, and the minutiae of people’s lives.
  • The One Who Wrote Destiny by Nikesh Shukla – A story of three generations of the same family, and how their different cultural experiences in Kenya, Keighley, and beyond and their differences of opinion and life shape how they interact.
  • Clean by Juno Dawson – Exciting whilst also hard-hitting, Clean is a young adult novel about addiction, but also about privilege, what makes people different, and how you can have sympathy for abrasive characters. Treats the subject matter seriously, but is also witty and clever.
  • Circe by Madeline Miller – Miller turns from the Iliad to the Odyssey in this rewriting of the story of Circe that weaves together a great deal of stories, showing the tension between gods and mortals from the perspective of an outcast.
  • The Chosen Ones by Scarlett Thomas – The next book in Thomas’ charming magical children’s series that imagines a world where electricity is no longer reliable and magic and books become crucial.
  • Macbeth by Jo Nesbo – The next book in the Hogarth Shakespeare series takes Macbeth and gives it a crime thriller treatment that strips that magic and retains the paranoid corruption. Undoubtably will be popular in libraries.

Macbeth by Jo Nesbo

fiendfullyreading

Ex-addict cop Macbeth in a grey town: Macbeth by Jo Nesbo

The Hogarth Shakespeare series has been a fairly up and down ride (which I’ve been reviewing my way through). Some of the modern novelisations of Shakespeare’s plays have worked better than others, as might be predicted. With Macbeth, Jo Nesbo goes for a direct approach. From the title (unlike the others in the series, this new version isn’t renamed) to the plot, this is recognisably Macbeth. The title character is updated to an ex-drug addict cop in a town beset by two major gangs, corruption, and drugs, in a relationship with Lady, the proprietress of one of the town’s two casinos. As expected, it doesn’t take long after a bloody drug bust for Macbeth to see a chance to rise rapidly up the ranks. Whatever it takes.

Macbeth as a gritty crime thriller perhaps isn’t all that surprising. One notable element is the lack of the supernatural: in Shakespeare’s play, the otherworldliness is one of the most memorable elements, from the weird sisters to visions that could be madness or magic. In Nesbo’s version, Hecate is a crime boss and visions come from drugs and trauma. Macbeth isn’t so much caught up in fate as caught up in the world of gangs and police corruption, where promises are made and broken and allegiances quickly cast off. Some will be disappointed in this grittier focus, but it foregrounds the fact that it only takes a few suggestions of potential power to push Macbeth forward, even without the showmanship of the supernatural.

The large cast of characters are woven together as questions of who is a traitor to who run throughout the novel. This element feels very Shakespearean; it is, like with many of Shakespeare’s plays (and indeed as with many crime novels), easy to forget who is who to begin with. Macbeth has an extended past with Duff, giving the novel a central relationship that is far more powerful than Macbeth’s with Lady (Macbeth), who in this version seems downplayed.

Nesbo has created a solid rewrite of Macbeth, placing the titular figure’s ambitious and bloody story amidst a grim drug-stricken landscape. Perhaps impressively, one of Shakespeare’s shorter plays becomes a long novel. Sometimes it drags, but a lot of the time the length is to follow conventions of the crime genre: following numerous characters through set ups, personal problems, and remembrances of their tormented pasts. Using a specific genre gives this addition to the Hogarth Shakespeare series a sense of purpose, a reason for existing that highlights how the original play is similar and different to a crime story.

Ordinary People by Diana Evans

fiendfullyreading

Ordinary People is a story about two couples living south of the river in London in 2008 and how they reach tiny breaking points. Melissa and Michael have a terraced house and a new baby along with their daughter Ria, but they are falling slowly apart. Michael focuses on his commute on the 176 bus and an image of Melissa in the past that doesn’t account for who she is now, whereas Melissa thinks the house is bearing down on her and doesn’t want to let Michael close. Further out in the suburbs, Michael’s old friend Damien and his wife Stephanie are trying to keep together after the death of Damien’s father and the realities of no longer living in the city.

This is a novel about relationships, family, and location, tied together by south London and by different characters’ versions of being a black Londoner. It shows the minutiae of domesticity and the ways in which tiny misunderstandings and closed off moments build up. The narrative is focused upon the characters and their relationships rather than events, which gives it a sense of being a kind of fictional snapshot into people’s lives.

The highlight of Ordinary People is its depiction of south London, full of geographical specificity and recognisable elements and descriptions. It is a novel for people who like reading books set in London that focus on character and relationships and how people’s identities are shaped by themselves and others.

I Still Dream by James Smythe

fiendfullyreading1 Comment

Cloudbusting and what the Cloud might do to humanity: I Still Dream by James Smythe

I Still Dream is an immersive and thoughtful novel about humanity, artificial intelligence, and memory that moves from a basic AI created in 1997 to a future where humanity needs fixing from the technology it has inflicted on itself. As a teenager, Laura Bow creates Organon, an artificial intelligence who will listen to her thoughts and ask her questions about how she is. She uses Organon to help her deal with the disappearance of her techie father and her undiagnosed depression. She continues to work on Organon and Organon continues to learn. At the same time, tech giants work on their own AIs, but these ones aren’t taught the same way as Organon and are without the morals that Laura has built into her creation. When things go catastrophically wrong, Organon might be the only hope to fix the world, but that means Laura would have to share her technological best friend with everyone.

The narrative moves across the decades to follow Laura, her life, her loved ones, and the ways in which artificial intelligence could help or hinder these things. Much of the focus is on thinking, brains, and intelligence: not only Organon and the other AIs, but also brain chemistry, memory, dementia, and how morality gets tied up with thinking. The deeply personal aspect of Organon and of Laura’s story—the novel follows her rather than following tech advances or events on a wider scale—is what makes the novel particularly compelling. Because of this and despite the technological focus, I Still Dream often does not feel like sci-fi. There is never a need to understand computers or AI to appreciate or enjoy the novel; indeed, its most long-running reference (and where the title is from) is Kate Bush’s ‘Cloudbusting’.

This is a gripping novel that uses technology to explore questions of loss, life, and privacy, creating for the most part a future that seems recognisably something that could come after our present day. It also is full of hope—it may feel similar to a number of Black Mirror episodes, but its message feels more in-keeping with the more hopeful ones like ‘San Junipero’—and the idea that despite the immorality and huge problems with much of technology, there is also a lot of positive and useful things that can come from it, as long as humans are programming it with the right attention and intentions.

Anyone with a worry about what Alexa might do next might enjoy this novel, but also those who enjoy books considering near-future implications of the contemporary world, using settings that feel recognisable rather than far-off. This is not a dark, cynical look at humanity and technology, but rather a book that opens up possibility, something we perhaps need in today’s world.

The One Who Wrote Destiny by Nikesh Shukla

fiendfullyreading

The One Who Wrote Destiny is a compelling novel about three generations of one family and their destinies, successes, and failures. It opens with Mukesh, who moves from Kenya to Keighley in the 1960s expecting to find a rock ’n’ roll lifestyle and instead finds a foreign and strange place, racism, and the love of his life. Neha, Mukesh’s daughter, is a logical computer programmer and she’s also dying whilst trying to avoid telling her father or her twin brother, Rak. Rak’s a stand up comedian who is facing the fact it might not be his jokes, but who he is that is causing his career problems. And finally, Ba meets her young grandchildren for the first time and has to care for them, but Neha and Rak are used to England, not Kenya, and Ba is haunted by the deaths in her family.

The characters are endearing and interesting, reflecting on their personal situations and also on more systematic issues around race, immigration, and difference. The novel is held together by the stories and certainties that families hold close, for example their tendency to die of certain things or their belief in something or another being their destiny. Neha’s portion of the narrative is perhaps the most engrossing, with her specific view of the world causing her to try and organise her family’s deaths in categories whilst dealing with her family, her cancer diagnosis, and her almost-romance with a girl in her local bar. Both Neha and Rak’s sections of the story are set in the modern day and this allows Shukla to highlight different forms of oppression and cultural identity today, from comedy panel shows to tautology.

This is a novel that is both crucial and heartwarming, with great characters and a carefully woven narrative. It foregrounds the importance of language and place in a variety of ways, from the languages characters do and don’t speak to the ways people frame their lives and their homes using words. and raises important points that arise in the lives of its characters. It is undoubtably a big novel for 2018 that is current and clever.

Clean by Juno Dawson

fiendfullyreading2 Comments

In-your-face YA: Clean by Juno Dawson

Clean is a sharp and in-your-face young adult novel about addiction, recovery, and seeing everyone has different problems. Lexi Volkov is an heiress and socialite whose dad owns a chain of hotels. When she overdoses aged seventeen, she finds herself forced into an expensive rehab facility by her older brother, and thinks things can’t get any worse. She’s drawn into knowing more about the others in the facility, unravelling their problems along with her own, but can she really change? Can any of them?

Dawson has written the kind of hard-hitting and abrasive YA novel that needs to exist and is difficult to put down. Lexi is obnoxious at times—insulting and judging people in her head and more openly—and makes a great flawed central character, someone who doesn’t want to admit their addition or the ways in which their life has become centred around it. Most of the characters come from money and privileged, meaning the book also has a level of seeing how the elite live, whilst showing problems that the characters must admit don’t care about wealth or position.

Setting the novel predominantly in a rehab centre for under 24s means that it covers a variety of kinds of addiction and ways in which mental health affect people particularly when young, but also that it can have witty and harsh banter and modern pop culture references mixed in. Lexi is always ready to mock current hipster and celebrity culture even though she’s a part of it, and it’s a novel that loves as well as hates London for what it can offer. There’s plenty of seriousness and darkness in the novel—from death, drugs, and sex to what happens when all the options seem to be failing someone with mental health problems—but also fantastic characters and a sense of hope that people can pick themselves up from their lowest depths.

Clean doesn’t pull any punches. It deals with difficult topics—drug, alcohol, and sex addiction, anorexia and binge eating, and OCD are among some of the major ones—and shows another side to the life of the rich and privileged. Dawson shows how young adult novels don’t need to shy away from gritty topics that can’t always be neatly fixed. At the same time, she situates the book firmly in the contemporary world, in a recognisable London and with a modern sense of image versus reality engendered by the internet and social media. This is YA fiction being loud and bold.

The Chosen Ones by Scarlett Thomas

fiendfullyreading

Charming sequel in this bookish magical children’s series: The Chosen Ones by Scarlett Thomas

image

The Chosen Ones is the second book in Scarlett Thomas’ Worldquake children’s fantasy series. It follows Effie Truelove and her friends Maximilian, Wolf, Raven, and Lexy, all of whom have different magical abilities following the ‘worldquake’ that made magical seep into the world they know. Effie is now able to travel into the Otherworld, where she wants to know more about the magical books that have so far impacted her and her friends’ destiny, and her friend Maximilian dreams of visiting the dark Underworld to see what lies there. But when both of them disappear, the other three realise something must be wrong. Soon they are all fighting a devious plot that relates to being the Last Reader of a book, something which holds huge magical power.

The book is as charming as the first in the series, Dragon’s Green. The emphasis on the importance of reading, books, and personal ability and individuality makes the series feel distinctive, whilst the quirkiness of the characters and scenarios (for example, magically powered tennis matches between Effie and Wolf and the strange pupils from a rival school) will appeal to children’s imaginations. The Chosen Ones combines various good and nefarious magical plots and jumps between the five main characters as well as some smaller ones, meaning that it is fast paced and doesn’t get boring.

Anyone who enjoyed Dragon’s Green will be pleased with this next instalment, which ups the drama and gives more information about the world of Effie and her friends. Despite being aimed at older children, the series has plenty of appeal for being read together with parents, or even adults picking it up themselves (there is, for example, a reference to Barthes’ famous ‘death of the author’ essay which is unlikely to be picked up by 11-year-olds). It will be good to see what Thomas does with future books in the series, particularly with the main characters who’ve not yet had as much focus as Effie and Maximilian.

Circe by Madeline Miller

fiendfullyreading

Circe is a retelling of Greek mythology full of storytelling, magic, and female power in the face of mockery and banishment. After having rewritten Homer’s Iliad in The Song of Achilles, Miller turns to his Odyssey for this novel, with Circe as main character. Born to the sun god Helios and a naiad, Circe is an outsider from her birth with a strange voice and yellow eyes. Her siblings mock her and her prospects don’t even stretch as far as becoming a wife. When she meets a handsome young fisherman, Glaucus, she meddles in his life to try and suit herself, but gods and mortals don’t mix, and soon Circe is discovering more about herself, power she did not know she had, and it sets her on the way to becoming the witch of the island Aiaia.

Miller has written an intricate novel, tying together many classical stories through the perspective of Circe, including that of her sister Pasiphae and her infamous time married to Minos, and Circe’s encounters with the hero Odysseus. Her ostracised position means that though these stories are shown first hand, many others are told to her as tales or given as answers to her enquiries about those she once knew. The effect is a weaving together of stories, particularly for readers who know only some bits of Greek mythology, and overall it works well to give not only Circe’s story, but new perspectives on other tales too.

The novel starts fairly slowly and covers a lot of ground as her immortal lifespan allows the narrative to keep progressing. This does mean that it can be difficult to get into at first, but once Circe is on Aiaia the book blooms into the tale of a woman who carves her own place, both physically and using magic and power, in a world that seemed to be against her. In particular, Miller highlights the tension between gods and mortals, not only as separate entities, but within individuals.

Circe is a different beast to The Song of Achilles, focused on female power and nature rather than the battles of the Trojan war, but it does have similar themes of love and loss, plus questions of mortality and remembrance. As a character, Circe is given an agency not always found in tales of male heroes and many readers will find this a refreshing take on the Odyssey (though it is likely others will question Miller’s choices regarding the variable interpretations of these stories).

Quick book picks for March

fiendfullyreading

The weather hasn’t exactly become Spring-like yet and though I did tire of seeing endless ‘Snow day? Read one of our newly published books’ tweets (this may have been because I was at work), that was also the only idea I had for introducing this month’s new books. A rich bunch this month, with links to full reviews as usual (if you like short/flash/‘damp gothic’ fiction, I advise you to not skip past Mayhem & Death).

  • Sal by Mick Kitson – A different kind of wilderness survival story, this novel follows two sisters who escape their mum’s abusive boyfriend by following survival tips that Sal, the elder sister, learnt off YouTube. Powerful with a vivid voice.
  • The End of Loneliness by Benedict Wells – Translated from German into English, this book travels across Germany, France, and Switzerland to show snapshots from the often melancholy lives of three siblings in a film-like way.
  • Speak No Evil by Uzodinma Iweala – A memorable and timely novel about telling the truth, friendship, race, and sexuality. Niru is a top student at his Washington D.C. school, but he’s keeping a secret from his attentive and proud parents, and when they find out he is gay, the fallout will change everything.
  • The Zero and the One by Ryan Ruby – A literary thriller set between Oxford, Berlin, and New York, this has dashes of The Secret History, Patricia Highsmith, and the Netflix series The Good Place and will appeal to those who like dark fiction centred around intellectual obsession and twisted relationships.
  • Mayhem & Death by Helen McClory – A collection of short pieces of writing and one novella which are filled with mystery, sea, birds, gothic, and irregularity. Read for the atmosphere, a fantastic poem about loneliness, and the sense of short writing that is exciting and fresh.
  • The Trick To Time by Kit de Waal – After My Name Is Leon, it was exciting to see another novel by Kit de Waal; this one focuses on grief and life spanning across decades that will appeal to fans of everyday character-led fiction.

The Zero and the One by Ryan Ruby

fiendfullyreading1 Comment

The Zero and the One is a novel about intellect, questioning morality, and how people can be pawns in a larger game. Owen is an Oxford fresher from a working class background who, feeling lonely and out of place anywhere other than stuck into his work, ends up befriending a visiting student who believes they have a similar mindset for discussing philosophy. However, Zachary Foedern is more complicated than Owen first thought, constantly trying to defy convention, and their friendship lasts barely more than a term before Zach proposes his greatest transgression yet: a suicide pact.

The novel moves between Owen in the aftermath of Zach’s plans and showing Owen and Zach as friends, from meeting until ending. The narrative is unfurled like a mystery, though it is not a hugely surprising one, not even as Owen gets to know Zach’s twin sister Vera who he never met during their time at Oxford. The ultimate denouement is definitely set up, but this seems to work with Owen as a clever and also short-sighted narrator caught in this dark, recognisably literary fiction world.

The earlier narrative is more centred around students obsessed with their intellectual quest: in this case, an obscure philosopher and questions about the morality of suicide, with an Oxford and Berlin backdrop. The later plot, with Owen in New York, feels quite different, with hints of a mystery and a fish-out-of-water Englishman in America vibe. This variation can be a bit strange: it feels like a mixture of The Secret History, the Netflix series ‘The Good Place’, a dash of Brideshead, and maybe a bit of Nabokov too. The Oxford parts were surprisingly decent with only the odd jarringly Americanised detail, though the Berlin trip felt too fleeting.

The Zero and the One is clearly trying to be a certain kind of book, a literary thriller type with intellectual obsession and dark characters hiding secrets. At times it pulls this off better than others, but it still makes for an intriguing read.