This week in Italy, as well as seeing many beautiful mountain views from hilltop towns, and making friends with lots of local cats, and eating some fabulous food, I have read:
A Town Like Alice
The Complete Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Brave New World
PopCo (Scarlett Thomas)
A Week in December (Sebastian Faulks)
I also started reading Anna Karenina on the plane on the way home but that was always an ambitious ask after 3 hours' sleep!
Let's start with the non-list ones first.
Scarlett Thomas wrote The End of Mr Y, which was my favourite book of 2009. PopCo was published earlier, but shows the same level of creativity and storytelling ability as the End of Mr Y. Alice is a bit of a misfit working for PopCo - the third biggest toy company in the UK. She is reluctantly attending PopCo's annual creativity conference in Devon when she is selected, along with a small group of others, to remain behind indefinitely after the conference and develop a product set which will kickstart a craze amongst the difficult-to-reach teenage girl demographic. The concentrated seminars, designed to help them understand how a toy craze takes hold, makes her increasingly aware of and uncomfortable about the way toys and marketing are designed to manipulate children. This leads into some interesting questions of ethics, globalisation & trade. Alongside this story, Alice is working to crack a code left to her by her grandfather, and also trying to work out who is communicating with her in code within the PopCo centre. The author has clearly done her research and goes into extensive detail on codes, how they work, how they are decoded, different methods etc - but it always complements the story, and doesn't feel like it's just a show and tell of how much she has learned! There are other threads to the story too, and the whole thing weaves together to create a gripping, intelligent and frequently surprising work of fiction. I absolutely loved it, and couldn't put it down.
Secondly, Sebastian Faulks. I have mixed feelings about this one. Faulks' earlier work, particularly Birdsong/Charlotte Grey/Girl at the Lion d'Or, is fantastic, and they are some of my favourite books. However, more recently I've found him much harder to read - Human Traces was just too academic, and I struggled to engage with Engleby. So, I started A Week in December without massive expectations. It's set in 2007 in the context of the banking meltdown, and follows characters ranging from a hedge fund trader to a tube train driver. It's pretty readable but I don't think Faulks' modern style displays him at his best - the dialogue is a bit cliched and stilted. It might be that the event is too much in recent memory to have fiction written about it and to create a sense of originality. So, if you are a Faulks fan, I'd probably recommend reading it, but it isn't amazing.
Sherlock Holmes was the first book I read on the Kindle. It proved that the Kindle is very much a viable medium for reading, and I didn't really notice too much of a difference from reading a book. Well, that's not strictly true I guess, but it is easy to read on, doesn't strain the eyes, and it's actually quite nice that you can just switch it off, and on again, and it is in the same place - no need for a bookmark (lazy reader...!). Sherlock Holmes is, of course, great. Very readable, each case is a distinct story in itself, and each time the resolution is one which seems so simple, but beyond the capability of me as a reader to work it out! It definitely deserves its place within the top 100 list - I enjoyed it very much.
Brave New World is chilling, and creates a convincing image of the new society where babies are grown to fit the genetic characteristics required for the role they are due to play, and a caste system is created according to physical and intellectual ability - but this doesn't matter as all humans are conditioned from birth to be happy with their lot & capacity. When the striving for a "better" life is removed, and the individual does not feel that they should be capable of more than "just" working in a factory, for example, everyone is happy. And, if they are not happy, "soma" is provided, a drug which can be taken to numb emotional disappointments and distress, so that the unhappiness never truly exists, and passes by the time the soma wears off.Bernard is a member of the highest caste but doesn't truly fit in, and he is already dissatisfied with life, reluctant to take soma "holidays", and wishing for a lasting relationship with one woman rather than the now socially acceptable "everyone belongs to everyone". He then visits the New Mexico Reservation, and meets a woman who was cast out of acceptable society to bring up her son. The brave new world, when viewed through the eyes of John "the Savage", who is essentially viewing the world with the morals of Huxley's period of writing, does not seem as perfect as individuals are conditioned to believe. This is a fantastically constructed world, and does deserve its reputation, but it doesn't quite have the strength of 1984 - the characters are less engaging, and the writing is more distant. That's not necessarily to say that 1984 is better - Brave New World goes further in terms of the way that society has developed, and the way that this is maintained - but I did enjoy reading it more.
And finally, A Town Called Alice. This is one of my mother's favourite books, and I believe one of my Grandad's favourite books too. I can't believe I haven't read it before. It centres around Jean Paget, who is a prisoner of war in Malaya and is forced to walk hundreds of miles, in a ragtaggle group of women and children, after they are captured - there is no prisoner of war camp to put them into, and so the Japanese keep them on the move. Jean takes the lead and proves herself to be "a damned fine girl". Following the war, she inherits a large sum of money and goes out to Malaya to build a well for the village where she spent 3 years towards the end of the war. There, she finds out that Joe, an Australian that she met during the war, was not killed as she supposed, and decides to go to Australia to find him. The second part of the novel is Jean making sense of Australian society, and deciding to make a difference. This is a really uplifting work, due to the strength of Jean's character, her ability to achieve anything in any situation, whilst being really an ordinary girl. It is also a love story. And it is beautifully written. I think it's going onto my list of favourites now too!
Onto Anna Karenina next, I think...
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