Ahmed Jameel's book blog

Words are cheap. Words are dear.

[andhu]

The Girl With All the Gifts

By M. R. Carey

I’m not certain how fair it is to start my opinion off with a note about the writer’s identity but here it is anyway. Carey intentionally obfuscates his identity by being vague about his other work. It is mentioned that he is a comics writer though. I felt hesitant to read the book because I had heard that it was written by a comics writer, and I see now why Carey felt he had to be vague about his identity. There is a bit of discrimination, which is absolutely absurd because I’m a comics writer myself. There’s just some mild lack of confidence in the ability to deliver on the prose front.

Hopefully, my mind is a lot wider now, because The Girl With All the Gifts is excellently written, wonderfully plotted, and delivers an original take on an old premise very deftly. The characters are well drawn, never even momentarily snagging on a cliche, their respective impetuses and growth seamless. The world building is majestic, the plot is devious, dark, and very clever.

What stood out the most, however, is the way information about anything at all is delivered. Carey gives us the right amount at the right time in increasingly imaginative ways, and then it all clicks. Every development is earned, every interaction is a pleasure, every meditation is both affecting and revealing. Nothing is static, and it’s all carried by prose that is economic, powerful and never veers into condescending.

Without giving away too much, I just need to say that this post-apocalypse has its place among the sea of voices out there, even though at first it might not seem so. Read it!

[andhu]

The Library at Mount Char

By Scott Hawkins

Firstly, I’ve really got to say that this book has a wicked, wicked imagination and frequently disturbing material. That isn’t to say any of it is tasteless though, quite the opposite. With a modern pantheon of gods-in-training and a paradigm shift shaking the world, we’re presented with a tale of betrayal at a superhuman level. The Library at Mount Char is gripping, imaginative, and twisted but it’s not consistently well written. I’ve not read any of Hawkins’s other work - though I can’t claim to be Mr Current with fiction, really - so based on very little, he strikes me as a new writer.

What complaint is this, you may ask, and it would be a fair question. Hawkins is not a bad writer by any means. What I refer to are the occasional turns of phrase that strike me as conversational in a way not quite congruous to the rest of the prose. Then there are the occasional bad choices of words, which detract from the experience too. His storytelling, build up, scene setting, dialogue - all of that is great. It’s just that fairly frequently I’d find myself a little irritated with some aspects of the voice. There are the occasional times when just the opposite happens, and the rare sentence just jumps out.

Then there’s the major plot point upon which a great deal pivots, an attachment that I just cannot believe. This isn’t to say that it’s unearned; quite a lot of time is spent on unspooling this attachment in a way that makes sense. It was just too much to ask for, for me to believe in it in the context of the storyworld. Maybe that’s just my crust of cynicism being too thick to be cracked…

In any case, neither of the points I bring up are truly deal breakers. There’s a wicked plot and very memorable characters afoot, with a fascinating mythology solidly holding everything up. Maybe I’ve just been spoiled by reading so much excellent writing that a good one finds it harder to reach me.

[andhu]

The Buried Giant

By Kazuo Ishiguro

Gosh, I thought when I started the novel, this is bloody dull. Ishiguro begins The Buried Giant with a bit of preamble about situating the tale within our world, and honestly, this is a horrid way to start what turns out to be a really good fantasy novel by a “literary” novelist.

We have the worldbuilding, we have the wonderful themes which shimmer below the surface for a long time before surfacing and developing into magnificent ideas. We have the twists and the emotional core, and a satisfying tale. We have a sure hand to deliver all this, a confident voice that never falters. It’s a wonderful novel with a very human story, definitely worth your time.

Ishiguro, like many “literary” writers who take the stab at genred fiction, bring certain characteristics to the table. For instance, the novel retains a certain sense of literariness in that its not interested in being perceived as genre fiction. The way it’s written is very much for those who already read the work of writers like Ishiguro and Ian McEwan. This is still very much an artist delivering profound statements about the human condition, and in this case creating a very interesting commentary on myth and memory. It’s just not so invested in the storyworld as most genre fiction is.

I say all of this like these are caveats - they’re not. I’m just making an observation about “literary” writers foraying into genred territory. The Buried Giant is a great novel I’ll be thinking about for a long time, and you should read it too!

[andhu]

A Darker Shade of Magic

By V.E. Schwab

For every meticulously built world I have encountered in sci-fi and fantasy fiction there’s one which hasn’t been very well realised, with some element(s) of sloppiness unravelling the whole premise. Then there are the wonderfully realised worlds, of which the fiction set in them do not tell wonderful stories. I think the last novel or series that really hit true greatness was Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles. I can very happily say I’ve found another novel containing the same kind of greatness. A Darker Shade of Magic has a wonderful premise, making old concepts such as alternate reality hopping new, with details that hold everything together without any of that last-minute plot devices lesser storytellers use to crudely form an ending. The two leads are as far away as you can get from the insipid, wide-eyed leads whom fantasists often have to use in order to introduce the rules of their worlds. Schwab’s characters never veer into cliche, and she quickly establishes their personalities in a few beats, while also delivering believable twists and surprising surprises. The prose is never ornate, keeping things brisk and running smoothly, yet delivers rich detail and well crafted scenes and settings. It would be a terrible mistake to say Schwab’s writing is unremarkable though - there are moments of beauty that caught me off guard, and it is a testament to Schwab’s mastery that she controls the ebb and flow of her prose so wonderfully. I cannot say a bad thing about this book. A Darker Shade of Magic is simply well crafted, well written fantasy.

[andhu]

The Left Hand of Darkness

By Ursula K. Le Guin

It has been a long time since I started considering Le Guin the grande dame of speculative fiction. I had heard of her long before I got around to reading her work, and my first exposure was the terrible adaptation of her Earthsea novels by Studio Ghibli - the only bad film they ever made, in my opinion. I was put off by Le Guin for the general muddle of the anime until a fan of the novels enlightened me on how much of a disservice the adaptation was. The biggest point that stuck out to me was the whitewashing. I was intrigued by the notion of a fantasy novel that wasn’t set in a European-style world, where the whiteness of the few fair characters was considered strange and unnatural.

Le Guin has the prose, the magic, the wit, and the powerful personal struggles that fantasy stories often neglect in favour of moving characters towards plot points like chess pieces. Her characters themselves are real people, fallible and endearing, their motivations not always compatible with those around them.

These same qualities are present in The Left Hand of Darkness, the latter point possibly even more so. The novel is a fascinating treatise on gender and sexuality but most of all on communicating across cultures. The world of Winter is populated by a race who is ambi-sexual, in that their genitalia adapt to be compatible with their desired partner. Multiple couplings with the same partner could result with one being female one time, male the other.

Yet this is only part of the cultural divide between the populace of Winter and the protagonist, an alien ambassador. There is the issue of layers of connotations in communicating, and the various politics of the nations of the harsh arctic world.

None of this ends up being world building gimmicks either. The whole story hangs upon these points, and the plot has Le Guin’s wonderful idiosyncrasy of being both intensely personal and global in scope. There is no doubt that this is one of the most important science-fiction/fantasy books ever written, nor do I doubt it will cease to be. Read it, read it, read it.

[andhu]

note: i don't know why but i need to

I’ve really let this blog gather dust, haven’t I? I occasionally make the excuse for losing sight of a point to doing this, and occasionally find myself struggling to get through books. I recently found myself unable to read novels on top of the heavy reading for my PhD. That was a horrible period where I felt as if a large part of life was cordoned off. I managed to get back into novels but going was slow for a while, as I could only manage a few pages in bed before I conked out for the night.

I’ve carved out more time in my days now and do read very regularly - almost as much as I used to. I no longer have any doubt that my appetite will be back to normal once the PhD is out of the way (hopefully sometime next year). However, I’ve ignored this blog, which is meant to be a record of everything I’m reading and my impressions of them at the time. Sometimes this is because I forget about it. More often, it’s because I don’t feel that it matters, as I can never tell if anybody reads this (or as importantly, that I ever will). I can’t quite understand why, but I feel some amount of sadness at the dust I’ve let gather here. Maybe because I’ve put a bit of myself into the blog.

A few days ago, I got a mail from someone who’d read the blog. She told me I had to keep writing, although she said she didn’t know why. I was and am incredibly moved by this. I subsequently browsed through my posts and found myself staring at the titles of books I had forgotten I’d read, and thoughts I had forgotten I’d had.

Thank you, friend, for reintroducing  pleasure I’d forgotten. Thank you for forcing me to reclaim something important - though neither of us know why it’s important. I can’t claim I understand blogging, and I certainly don’t believe that my every thought is important enough to be trumpeted at the first instance, but if writing them down here works as both a record for myself and something even remotely fun or interesting to someone else, it certainly must be worth it!

Thank you again, friend, and know that every post from here on out is a result of your reaching out.

London, England 2:04PM

[andhu]

Amrita

By Banana Yoshimoto

The dust jacket says something along the lines of Yoshimoto being the voice of young Japan. I don't know quite what to make of that. If, say, I were a diligent fellow, I'd have a look at when this was said. But lately I've come across the idea that the experience of all art is socially constructed (i.e. if I read Don Quixote today and if I'd read Don Quixote when it was released, it would be a completely different experience even though the text itself is unchanged) and for some reason - maybe because the cover of the book is so minimalistic with its simple character and lower case type face, I decided I'd like to go in with no baggage, entirely blank.

And blankness lies very much at the heart of this novel. Don't be mistaken in thinking Amrita has anything to do with the 'blank generation' - it's the mundane that's the central theme if I'm not mistaken. Yoshimoto deals with the sublime in the day-to-day, with the protagonist Sakumi's experience of it being disjointed and defamiliarising.

The translation has an innocence and slightly awkward phrasing that I've found is characteristic of many manga scanlations and fan-subbed anime. At times it's charming although it often strikes the wrong key. But then again, the entire novel is off beat but the plot is so in an engaging way. There was the one scene I found a bit too much, especially how the characters dealt with it afterwards (it's the scene where Yoshio proves to Sakumi the nature of his predictions) that I found lacking in imagination and too far off kilter but every other scene of this nature I found to be well within the subject matter and narrative ambition of the plot.

Occasionally, the storytelling meanders a bit, and I do get the impression that maybe Yoshimoto wasn't sure of the story she wanted to tell when she got to the middle but I have to admit that once I changed my mindset and tried to just take the novel as it was, I began to enjoy it. I'll certainly be trying one of Yoshimoto's shorter novels again at some point. 

If you're feeling patient, Amrita is worth your time. If you're on a holiday or if things are fast paced for you at the moment, move on to something with a more deliberate pace. Amrita is a read that demands you be okay with just letting go… like on a beach in Saipan.

I was trying to throw a curveball by not stating the obvious, but… how cool is her name?

[andhu]

note: i don't read as much as i should

It's true. I've been chipping away at Banana Yoshimoto's Amrita since early September. It's horrible. Not the book, I mean, the situation. The book is unusual and exciting in how it magnifies its gaze on the mundane and makes it mystical.

I've never been a good blogger. I've tried several times (mostly fiction or creative blogs) and the number of posts have never made double digits unless you like putting a zero in front of everything you count. This blog is, without a doubt, the most successful one I've ever done, with one exception: my research log.

My research log is a methodical affair. There I quote passages important to my research, religiously hash tag everything, and occasionally jot down my thoughts or reactions to a text. It's very useful and convenient but it's a slog, not a blog.

I'd like to do more here, as it seems to have gone quite well if a little sporadically. Incidentally, this is my only blog which isn't bloody password protected (my other blogs are my research log and my productivity log).

It's sad really. One thing I really want in my life is more reading. It's such a big joy. But my research means that I'm often too tired or too sick of letters to read for pleasure at the end of a seven- to eight-hour day of reading. However, it does mean that I read an awful lot of comics nowadays, especially good ones (surely bad ones can't be related to my research, haha).

In other words, I'll be adding comics reviews here. Hooray! Now, there's a considerable backlog of amazing stuff I've read, so don't expect all the obvious greats to be here, but I'll try and do some reviews on memory.

To all five of you who read me, brace yourself for disappointment, woyeah!

London, England 12:13 AM

[andhu]

I Wandered Lonely as a Clod I wandered lonely as a clod, Just picking up old rags and bottles, When onward on my way I plod, I saw a host of axolotls; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, A sight to make a man’s blood freeze. Some had handles, some were plain; They came in blue, red pink, and green. A few were orange in the main; The damnedest sight I’ve ever seen. The females gave a sprightly glance; The male ones all wore knee-length pants. Now oft, when on the couch I lie, The doctor asks me what I see. They flash upon my inward eye And make me laugh in fiendish glee. I find my solace then in bottles, And I forget them axolotls.

MAD Magazine Issue#43, 1958

[andhu]

Wolf Hall

By Hilary Mantel

I'm not sure what I make of this. Mantel's prose is very clear and fluid, definitely easy reading, and she doesn't get carried away with being writerly. In fact, when beautiful prose does make an appearance, it's striking. I suppose one could make the argument that the best prose is the prose you don't notice you're reading, making you turn the page. In some cases, I can agree with that, but Wolf Hall feels a bit like airport reading.

The scenes are very short for one thing. Concise, I can hear you correcting me, and I would begrudgingly agree. The book covers a very long period of time, and this really is the only way to go about it. Mantel's selections of what to depict, and the ever more important how of the depictions is very strategic.

There's no deadweight but there's enough lingering to deflect any accusation that it's all just functional drab. There's development, there's growth. I imagine the book flows so well because pretty much all of it is interaction, dialogue and stare downs, etcetera. Characters are always doing something, the status quo has always changed after a scene.

It all feels quite strange talking about the novel in these terms, as it is a historical novel. But after I finished, I couldn't help but feel that the novel was a meandering affair. I had to argue with myself that it's historical fiction, that Mantel's working under some serious constraints, but then (perhaps unfairly) I thought of I, Claudius and how absolutely gripping that is.

Wolf Hall is a bit of a mixed bag for me but by no means a bad novel.

[andhu]

Captain Corelli's Mandolin

By Louis de Bernières

Wow. I'd heard this book was good, I'd been told by a lot of people to read it, but funnily enough, I'd no idea what the book was actually about. Now that I think about it, the last point there is quite surprising.

Louis de Bernières is a captivating writer. He got me hooked right from the start. There's something very gentle about his telling. He's created this island and populated it with a lot of loving care. You come to know and care about these people, and it's all the more heartbreaking when this innocence is lost. 

That's when de Bernières gets outright brutal and ruthless, and you feel every blow. He is masterful with his handling of tragedy and comedy. The way they're interwoven makes sure you hit the low points but aren't abandoned there, and when you hit the high points, there's something that'll remind you of the seriousness of the situation, so it isn't trivialised.

The book's particularly remarkable in that the central character that gives the novel its unique flavour shows up only halfway through. Even with foreshadowing and allusions the moment doesn't lose its punch.

The book is sweet, sweet pain. It (hopefully) got me back into blogging again. Be warned that I had the advantage of reading it on Kindle. The author is particularly wordy and I had to look up words pretty much once every other page. It might be annoying to read in print without a dictionary on hand. It's not a requisite, of course, but there's something about the prose that makes you want to find out just exactly what that word meant...

Read on kindle.

[andhu]

note: 2013, neglect, bunch of excuses

I am filthy. Absolutely filthy.

I've not updated in too long not because I haven't read anything but because it's just been too tiring and I've been in a bit of a pit. I've been in visa limbo since September while my PhD project is gathering dust and I'm slowly losing sight of what it could have ever meant.

I've been reading good stuff, it's just that after attempting to go through with my Booker run, I snagged on Nadine Gordimer and didn't read for a while. I fell out of the habit of posting after that.

I'm beginning to see a trend. Let's hope I manage to keep it going this time. I might chuck in some comics too, and possibly blog and articles off the net. I've not decided yet.

Ah, well. Happy 2013. I'm stuck in Sri Lanka waiting for the bloody UKBA to decide whether they'll give me a visa or not.

Colombo, Sri Lanka 7:15PM

[andhu]

Holiday

By Stanley Middleton

I hadn't realised I didn't post this! Shows you how committed I am to this blog. As part of my Booker run, I decided to follow the sequence of available ebooks to Holiday. I must say that the synopsis didn't impress me. In this day and age I reckon it would take a pretty convincing cover letter and sample or an eccentric publisher to pick this up as 'lit fic'.

While I'm still grappling with the idea of the Booker's identity, I get why this is 1974's co-winner (the other one being Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist). It's a non-linear telling of Edwin Fisher's personal crisis and his history with his wife, from whom he's been estranged. Edwin doesn't come off as very likeable, and I thought at the onset that he'd be very hard to sympathise with, especially considering some of the things that run through his mind. It becomes easier when he's forced into a defensive position and never comes out a winner.

But then the book distinctly falls into a But That's Life category, and there are no pretensions or prejudices in either the telling or what it says. And it's brilliant. I like what the narrative came to teach me about Edwin, and how the complications of his son's death and his strained marriage play out. There's nothing tidy or immaculate about it, and the realisation that there's more to anything than one narrator could possibly ever tell is a powerful thing when it hits you. 

Definitely not holiday reading but a great one.

Read on Kindle, started 5th June, finished 14th June.

[andhu]

note: joylessness (or half a review)

It's been a while since I started my Booker run, and while I had a good pace going, I'm simply stuck. I've little trouble reading on books I don't like, and I often come around to understanding, appreciating, or enjoying them. Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist is very well written, and I suspect that the prose is very much meant to reflect the setting.

But by god, this book is joyless. I love darkness, and I love dreariness in a book. I seek them out even. The Conservationist is just so joylessly written, however, that it's just become so much of an effort to even think about picking it up and going on. It's been nearly a month since I started it, I think!

Ah, ploughing on...

Malé, Maldives 3:44 AM

[andhu]

The Old Devils

By Kingsley Amis

This actually started out my recent Booker binge. I wanted to read something clever, wittily written, and comic. I thought of Amis's Lucky Jim, and figured I could do with some more Kingsley in my life. I set about on a search for what was considered the best Amis novel, and I stumbled on the winners archive on the Booker website. 'Kingsley!' I thought, and bought this without a second's hesitation.

The novel was far from what I thought it'd be but there's no doubt that it checks all the boxes. The Old Devils is written with an exceptionally skilled hand. Amis knows when to go on, he knows when to back off. He is a master storyteller.

But.

This is one of those stories where you're not in it for the plot. The plot does go to some unusual and unexpected places, mind you, but that's not what you're reading for. It took me a very long time to understand this. If this bothers you, ask yourself this: does real life have a fast-moving plot?

This 'flaw' is what plays to Amis's biggest strength. Every person in this novel is absolutely real, and everything they do and go through is real. These are flawed, irrational, beautiful people. The narrative is peppered with truths about life, and all of it comes from the latter end of the middle. You can't write a novel like this without life experience and a serious acquisition of wisdom.

I had to persevere and put in some effort as I didn't like any of the characters (except Charlie) much but I stuck through, even though my reading was broken off with The Siege of Krishnapur but ultimately this was a very rewarding read with a lot of commentary on people, age, love, life, and Wales. I can see why The Old Devils gets the praise it did.

Read on Kindle, started 12th May, finished 4th June.

[andhu]

The Siege of Krishnapur

By J. G. Farrell

I decided that if I'm going to continuously slag the Booker off (and quite schizophrenically praise it a few moments later) I'd better read more winners' work. I thought I'd start at the beginning. The first few books weren't available on Kindle, so this was the earliest Booker winner available to me.

I've got very mixed opinions about this. On one hand it's brilliant how it captures the colonial mentality and how the characters walk into the situation, their attitudes towards the horror they're faced with. What's particularly brilliant is how the feeling of a siege is captured. It is emotionally exhausting. There's a tone that could even be described as lighthearted running through the narrative that serves to alleviate the weariness but it's only successful to an extent - as it should be - but it gets tiresome after a while.

And that's my problem with this book. It's a tiresome read. It's a bit too long and too exhausting. There is occasional vivid imagery described so well the text really springs out but on the whole it's not that engaging. I must assert that it serves as a great commentary on the colonial mind and perhaps that's how the award is justified. There's even a series of questions at the end which as if you imagine that this would win a Booker today. That was quite telling, I thought.

On the whole, this is one book that isn't terrible by any stretch of the imagination, but one that didn't really provide an enriching experience for me.

Read on Kindle, started 19th May, finished 30th May.

[andhu]

note

To compensate for the lack of content recently, and to lie to myself about how little I'm reading, I've decided to change the look of the blog. It is now more minimal and joyless. I joke. I love the type.

I joke. I'm on a Man Booker Prize crusade at the moment, having felt compelled to read the whole lot since I mention the award so often. With any hope this blog will stop sputtering and start up properly.

I do occasionally wonder who possibly reads this, and god, would it be awful if people I know read this. I get the occasional like when I fume too openly about topical disappointments or when I write about something really beloved. This shouldn't matter (and it doesn't too greatly) as I'm keeping this blog up just as a record of what I read and my impressions of it.

Still, one doesn't exist in vacuum...

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia 12:06 AM