#whitcoullstop100

[yourcharleyk]

First book done for 2019. Struggled through this one. Sad story but not particularly moving IMO for some reason. Anyone else read it? What did you think? - - - - - - #kimedwards📖 #KimEdwards #holidayreading #whitcoullstop100 #thememorykeepersdaughter #jodipicoult (at Victoria Park, Auckland) https://www.instagram.com/p/BsHAw8XFuwy/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=jveen73qfya3

[shelfandother-blog]

#99: American Gods by Neil Gaiman (2001, revised 2004)

American Gods assumes and entertains a reader who pays attention, and who is willing to keep in mind several competing but not exclusive visions of reality. This takes form in some areas as shifts in focalisation: stories about people who brought their beliefs to America, how people made their Gods, how they kept them or forgot them, or, as in some instances, what kinds of journal entries such gods might make once they’d settled into American society. Expect magic, dirt, sex, good dialogue, death, undeath, jokes and, of course, America and its gods, according to Neil Gaiman. American Gods is listed as one of the ‘Fantasy’ entries on the Whitcoulls list, which is probably as good a label as any. It won several genre-fiction awards across sci-fi, horror, and fantasy, which is to say that by genre it’s a Neil Gaiman book. I read Gaiman’s 2004 expanded edition which adds some twelve thousand words to the version that won that slew of awards (Nebula, Hugo, Bram Stoker, Locus) on its publication in 2001. I have to assume that this re-editing was successful because I can’t imagine where those twelve thousand words have been added.

After One Day, which was a narrowly focused book in terms of its structure and characters, the sprawling, meandering structure of American Gods was a refreshing change. There is plenty of space for Gaiman to conjure up aspects of America, the migrant experience, the bounds of belief and trickery, and how ancient and modern-day world-views might be connected. Its plot encompasses the story of American identity, a love story, a road-trip narrative, an unfolding of a hidden world behind the everyday, a war story, the tale of uniting dangerous outcasts desperate for survival, the exposure of hidden mysteries (whodunnits and mystery-cult type mysteries both), an escape story, stories of old age and isolation, stories about the experience of migration, the struggle of an ex-prisoner’s return to society, and a little bit of alternate history to boot. All of this is overlaid with the myths, Gods and story-structures that Gaiman alludes to in his adoption of their parts. There’s plenty happening, and happening all at once. It’s gloriously messy and carefully plotted.

Aside from saying that it’s enjoyable and smart, and that you'll probably have fun reading it if you like that sort of thing (fun, I mean) there’s more I’d like to mention. So, while I’m doing more reading for numbers 98 (Scar Tissue) and 97 (Wolf Hall), this is what’s to come:

American Gods and Granny

American Gods and 2001

American Gods and Post-colonialism

  Also, over the next week, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and UFO in Her Eyes by Guo Xiaolu. 

[shelfandother-blog]

Mister Pip and a little more about #100

So, David Nicholls' One Day (#100 on the Whitcoulls Top 100, and the only one from the list I've written anything about, except for my cutting "Next up!" re:American Gods) has kept on bothering me. In particular, I still can't get over the extended quotations at the start of each of the book's five parts.The first two epigraphs are taken from Great Expectations, the next from James Salter's memoir Burning the Days, and the last two from Hardy -  Far From the Madding Crowd and Tess of the d'Urbervilles. These quotations act as heavy-handed explanations of THIS PART'S BIG IDEA and ask the reader to acknowledge thematic links between One Day and the books quoted. Aside from that, the first quotation, beginning "That was a memorable day to me.."  just made me want to go re-read Great Expectations and return to that memorable day of Pip's instead of embarking on the story of the as-yet unseen Dex and Em. Yet, on writing about it last week, I still wasn't sure: was any of this criticism fair?

After a week of letting my misgivings percolate, I've got a less equivocal opinion of these epigraphs. Here's what I think: it's inelegant and wasteful. A comparison between One Day and Lloyd Jones' Mister Pip was what clinched it, for me. Basically, One Day takes a lot from these quotations; it doesn't cast any light back on the texts from which these quotations came. By contrast, Lloyd Jones' 2006 novel Mister Pip takes up Great Expectations and then returns it changed, caught by an unfamiliar light. 

Mister Pip could not exist without Great Expectations, but it does not lean on Dickens for credibility nor does it use bits of the text for jarring, blunt statements about theme. Lloyd Jones takes the material into the narrative itself as his narrator retells and reframes it. When there are brief quotations from Dickens in Mister Pip, they seem a natural part of the novel:

It is in some ways even more direct than an isolated quotation might be, but its directness is a result of there being real, established connections between Matilda's story and Pip's. Here, connections can be explained and expanded by Lloyd's character; in One Day, voices from Dickens and Hardy are being used to explain Nicholls' text. The connection is at once obtrusively visible and yet much flimsier. It's worth saying that the passage above comes at almost the very end of the novel - so this explanation is a character's reflections, not, as One Day does, as a pre-emptive guide to ideas that Jones hasn't yet developed. One Day uses the text as a source of convenient thematic summary, accepting it uncritically and without anything to add.Reading Mister Pip makes reading Great Expectations an even broader, even more rewarding experience. One Day just makes me want to re-read Great Expectations instead of it. 

All of this is not to say that quotations or epigraphs are always derivative or obvious. The epigraph of One Day as a whole, Philip Larkin's 'Days' is a neat introduction to the story, its structure and its interest in time. Of course Mister Pip does also start with an epigraph:

Now that's how to do it. 

[shelfandother-blog]

Whitcoulls and its Top 100

I've recently been coming across a number of really great books on $5 or $10 sale tables at branches of Whitcoulls, NZ's largest and really only surviving brick-and-mortar book-retailing chain. I've brought home some amazing stuff: recent-ish issues of Landfall, heavily discounted NZ non-fiction titles (like Fighting to Choose, which I did a quick review of recently and Linda Bryder's history of National Women's Hospital), a fair bit of fiction, including that ultimate sleeper/comatose literary hit Stoner, (which I also did a brief review of recently), as well as a smattering of penguin classics. 

The fact that Whitcoulls was getting me and a pretty healthy number of other people through the door by selling actual real books with real words and real authors seems fantastic, given how most Whitcoulls shops have been increasingly about selling pens and very specific kinds of exercise books. But of course, as soon as a moment of thought or a lazy google-search is applied to the situation, the doleful truth makes itself apparent: Whitcoulls, like Bennets, like Dymmocks, like the NZ-contingent of Borders (itself owned by Whitcoulls), is selling off piles and piles of great books at great prices because they don't intend to keep being as much of a bookstore, and just need to get rid of the stuff at as small a loss as possible. Sad, but understandable.

Whitcoulls has never been the best, but its been a constant, and it has been nice to know that it's still a bookshop, with book-shelves and little notes reccommending this or that title, and an annual top 100 list. And in honour of the fact that Whitcoulls is a seller not just of reams of blank paper in a variety of formats but also a retailer of paper with text already printed onto it, I've set myself a task: to purchase (if I haven't already a copy) and (even if I have already read it) to read every book on the Whitcoulls top 100 books list of 2014-2015, from the Vampire Academy Series (yup.) to Andre Agassi's autobiography, to Catch 22, all the way to (though I'm not sure how I'll address this one) the original poor-kid-made-go(o)d- tale, The Bible.

Join me, won't you, imaginary reader, as I cast myself on the mercy of the NZ book-buying public and report back to you.

Let's do this.