Top Ten Tuesday | Books That Make You Think ???

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alex garland, An inspector calls, Barbara Kingsolver, Holes (film), Jorge Luis Borges, kurt vonnegut, Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch, Louis Sachar, The Handmaid's Tale, toni morrison, Top Ten Tuesday, William Golding

Could it be? Could I be getting back into doing meme’s again? Not likely, but here’s another Top Ten Tuesday post hosted by The Broke and the Bookish with this week’s topic as ‘books that make you think’. And would you believe it those are my particular speciality. Here’s my list in no particular order:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Lord of the Flies by William Golding – Not all that glitters is gold… This is a really powerful novel I revisited this year about the latent demon in us all. This is the ultimate story about how an island paradise could become hell as a bunch of harmless school children turn native in the true sense of the word. A good follow-up to this would be the more adult-themed ‘The Beach’ by Alex Garland which I also highly recommend.

2. Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver – Another gripping novel about how social norms don’t stand a chance in the wilderness, where survival means to conform or else. Nathan Price, a preacher with a will of iron, uproots his family taking them deep into the Belgian Congo where his plans of educating the savages ends in disaster. Told through the eyes of his wife and daughters, it makes one think about how one man’s right can be another man’s wrong.

3. Holes by Louis Sachar – An absolute gem; Stanley Yelnats battle with his accumulative ‘bad karma’ is both inspirational, touching and funny all at the same time. After reading this you will DEFINITELY make sure you don’t have any unfinished business, as it might have a way of coming back.

4. An Inspector Calls by J B Priestley – Not everything is as it seems in this detective  play. It explores the dangers of capitalism and raises interesting questions on the concept of ‘guilt’.

5. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood – Dystopian fiction that was so powerful I was actually haunted by it. It invaded my dreams at one point. I can’t imagine a society that would treat women as baby-making machines, but nothing is impossible…

6. Venus in Furs by Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch – I call this the ‘thinking persons 50 Shades’, as I am convinced that this book is what EL James took her inspiration from, to the point of ‘plagiarism’, so don’t give me all that crap about it being a Twilight fanfic! *snorts* Anyway, here is something with more narrative meat as it explores themes of love, cruelty and both physical and mental slavery to the desires of the flesh.

7. Beloved by Toni Morrison – To be able to peer into the depths of one mother’s murderous insanity and be able to call it fatal love… that is the high price Morrison asks of you in this novel. Can you do it?

 

8. Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges – Endlessly and deliriously looping pathways of questions without answers and answers to unknown questions. Borges plumbs the depths of your unconscious and offers it to you in beautifully executed prose. Less is more.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

9. The Cellist of Sarajevo – Novel about the terrible siege of Sarajevo. Told through the eyes of a handful of characters, it allows us to experience life lived in the  crosshairs of a sniper rifle. Powerful examples of humanity and the reason WHY people go to war.

 

 

 

 

10. Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut – You never really knew it before, but after reading this you will certainly realise how our world could (for all we know) be run by absolute madmen.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg (touche to no.10), what’s your top ten ‘thinking’ novels?

Related articles

• Holes (garth.typepad.com)
• Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Wouldn’t Mind Santa Bringing Me (booksandreviews.wordpress.com)
• Top Ten Tuesday: Dec 18 (coffeebeanbookshelf.com)
• Top Ten Tuesday – Christmas Gifts (December 25) (wcs53.wordpress.com)

Book Review | ‘The Angel’s Game’ by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

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Barcelona, book review, carlos ruiz zafon, edgar allan poe, gothic fiction, House of Usher, Jorge Luis Borges, Library of Babel, Shadow of the Wind, the angel's game

The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“I stepped into the bookshop and breathed in that perfume of paper and magic that strangely no one had ever thought of bottling.”

From the forbidden vaults of ‘Monk’ Lewis to the forgotten labyrinths of Borgian verse emerges ‘The Angel’s Game’, a sinister tale set in 1930’s Barcelona; a city both blessed and damned by the genius of its literary talent. Loosely following on from ‘Shadow of the Wind’, Zafon revisits old haunts like the antique book-dealer Sempere, Barcelo the publisher and the dangerously alluring ‘Cemetery of Forgotten Books’.

At the heart of this story is David Martin, a young man struggling to make ends meet as a crime-reporter by day and a writer of erotic gothic thrillers by night. With a little help from literary patron Pedro Vidal he soon strikes success with his pulp series ‘City of the Damned’. Martin then decides to become a full-time writer, yet living life by the pen means to have a ‘room of one’s own’, and in Martin’s case this means moving to an abandoned tower in the heart of the city. Driven by his growing fame and his literary aspirations, Martin soon begins to lose track of reality. An impending sense of doom begins to creep upon him as the macabre creations that populate his stories begin to show up in real life.

Meanwhile, a letter from enigmatic publisher Andreas Corelli begins a diabolical cycle of events that seem to involve Martin on a level beyond the physical realm, as he comes with an offer that Martin cannot refuse. Andreas Corelli, with his expensive stationary curiously embossed with angels and his devilish charm, wants Martin to write a book to surpass all books; a tome ‘with the power to change hearts and minds’. In return Martin will earn a fortune, and possibly more. But as he begins his undertaking, the shadows of the haunted tower stalk him and they begin to reveal a terrible history that was played out years ago within the walls of the mansion.

I love Zafon’s Barcelona. I say ‘his’, because it is so very different from any other version I have had the pleasure of reading. As a lover of old-fashioned Gothic, I revelled in the sepia-tinted landscapes and decayed, baroque buildings that evoked the bittersweet, naphthalene aroma of nostalgia. Another thing I cannot resist is a book about the terrible power and beauty of books; and that is exactly what rests at the heart of ‘The Angel’s Game’. As in ‘Shadow of the Wind’, Zafon yet again represents Barcelona as a city preoccupied with urban myths which in this novel, veers towards notions of bibliomancy.The characters in the novel (be they main or simply bit-part players) are all beautifully developed. I found myself liking all of them, even the ‘bad’ ones. But upon finishing it I discovered that the real hero here was simply and purely ‘books’, who throughout the story demand and conspire to be brought forth into the world through very innovative ways. In this way the Borgian influence is very apparent, as is the Poe-esque ‘The House of Usher’ flavouring he adds to the architecture. Zafon’s flirtation with Borgian metaphysics comes in the form of an homage by way of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books; a grotesque, cavernous labyrinthine library that one may gain admittance only through recommendation. Readers of Borges will recognise this structure and all its horror from his short story ‘The Library of Babel’ (to read, click on the link).

In short this novel is a bibliophile’s heaven. But anyone who has read ‘The Shadow of the Wind’ will also know of the secret pact one must agree to if they enter the cemetery, and the bad luck that ensues when one ventures to take out a book from the maw of that malicious place.

“As I walked, I ran my fingers along the spines of hundreds of books. I let myself be imbued with the smell, with the light that filtered through the cracks or from the glass lanterns that embedded in the wooden structure, floating among mirrors and shadows.”

What I also like about this story is how Zafon concentrates on a time when the written word still had a magical potency to bless or damn its author. This is a story of intricate secrets, where books are not simply of ink and paper, but are voracious, sentient beings with the capacity to cannibalise both master and reader. In Zafon’s world, books have more than one story to tell. As surely as there is a sub-text to every text, what I call the ‘world within a world’ or the whisper in the shout; there is also another more important story being playing out between each and every person that touches the cover of a single book. It is this personal history of the creation and career of these objects as they are launched into the world that forms the overarching narrative that continues until it is destroyed. The Cemetery of Forgotten Books guards against this literary death, and it is here that Martin witnesses what the cemetery really is: a morgue of human thought.

“Every book has a soul, the soul of the person who wrote it and the soul of those who read it and dream about it.”

However beautifully the plot was crafted and presented, I found this slightly lacking from ‘The Shadow of the Wind’, which earned a 5/5. Zafon tends to leave a few loose-ends to some sub-plots which, while it didn’t detract from the overall story, did annoy me a little. These little imperfections together with its’ ending (which was a bit anti-climatic) meant I couldn’t give it a full house. But all the same, fans of ‘The Shadow of the Wind’ will enjoy revisiting these old places and characters once more. In fact I felt a certain déjà vu in some places, as I remembered similar scenes being played out in ‘The Shadow of the Wind’. It gave me a weird sensation, as if I were watching two films at once. It’s the best experience of dramatic irony I have ever HAD!

I hope Zafon continues to spin tales based around Barcelona, especially if it includes the cemetery of forgotten books. Who is Sempere? Why does he damn people by introducing them to that awful place? And more importantly, what is the history of that awful place? Too many questions. I just hope Zafon can provide us with the answers.

View all my reviews

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• Book Review: The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (imaginemechanix.com)
• The Prince of Mist by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (lnatal.wordpress.com)
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Teaser Tuesday | Borgian Gothic Meets Godwinian Enlightenment

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carlos ruiz zafon, enlightenment period, Jorge Luis Borges, latin american, mary hays, mary wollstoncraft, meme, teaser tuesday, william godwin

 

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

I have teasers from two books this week, one from the acclaimed ‘The Angel’s Game’ by Carlos Ruiz Zafon and the other from Mary Hays ‘Memoirs of Emma Courtney’.  Some of you may know Zafon from his most popular novel ‘The Shadow of the Wind’, an excellent detective story involving the labyinthine world of books and the dark secrets of those who write them. Well, I’m glad to report that ‘The Angel’s Game’ takes place in the same setting with pretty much the same premise and includes the famous Sempere and Sons bookshop and the Borgian Cemetery of Forgotten Books. Reading it was like revisiting dear old friends. Here’s a small taster of the gothic goodness on page 75:  

“In the last rays of daylight falling on the city his eyes glowed like embers. I saw him disappear through the door to the staircase. Only then did I realise that during the entire conversation I had not once seen him blink.”

 

‘Memoirs of Emma Courtney’ on the other hand is a short but well-written epistolary novel. What drew me to it wasn’t the story per se, but Mary Hays relationship with the Enlightenment circle, especially William Godwin and Mary Wollstoncraft. Being a lady who never married, but felt married to her craft, I felt compelled to read something by her. This slim volume shows that she was heavily influenced by Godwinian theories, as ‘Memoirs’ looks at the position of women during the 1800’s and the frustrations caused by social confinements. It reads a little like Austen, tempered with feminist overtones of Wollstoncraft. On page 17, we discover how poor Emma Courtney’s idyllic life ends, as her adoptive father dies leaving her in the care of dubious relatives who are strangers to her. 

“This period, which I had anticipated with rapture, was soon clouded over by the graudual decay, and premature death, of my revered and excellent guardian. He sustained a painful and tedious sickness with unshaken fortitude;- with more, with chearfulness.”

Literary Blog Hop | J. L. Borges and the Quintessential Latin America

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Borges, Eudora Welty, Jorge Luis Borges, Latin America, meme, United States

Welcome to the ‘Literary Blog Hop’, a meme hosted by The Blue Bookcase for book bloggers who focus on reviewing literary fiction. This weeks’ hop comes with the question:

 

What setting (time or place) from a book or story would you most like to visit? Eudora Welty said that, “Being shown how to locate, to place, any account is what does most toward making us believe it…,” so in what location would you most like to hang out?

 

First of all, I’d like to thank Robyn for this weeks brilliant question. With some books I’ve often wished I could just dive into the setting and live there forever. The ones that made me feel this way are mostly set in or are by South American authors. Maybe it’s something to do with the way these writers write, but Latin America certainly does have a unique charm that blends the essence of two continents rather than one; the totemic mysteries of its indigenous tribes and the etiquette of colonial Europe. And it is on these two opposing axis’ that most Latin American literature is often played out. My first proper foray into it was seven years ago, when I came across ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ by Jorge Luis Borges. At the time I was studying the finer points of short story writing and among the collection we had to read, this one stood out as a masterpiece. It sent shivers through me, and put me on the path to discovery, even though the others in the class weren’t particularly moved by the mind-boggling possibilities of what Borges conveyed.

Even though the story wasn’t about Latin America, I had my first ever taste of ‘magical realism’, been introduced to the concept of ‘hypertext fiction’ and one of Borges’ more permanent ‘personal myths’; the book as labyrinth. In fact, Borges seldom wrote about Latin America. So strong and clear was his grasp of ‘fiction’; the quality of its parts both isolated and as a whole that his stories sit on the very precipice of reality and are just as challenging today as they were 80 years ago. It was this feeling of walking around inside his Daliesque world when I realised I had probably stumbled upon Latin America at its most quintessential. Ultimately, Borges brought around the idea that a country, its people, its violent histories, its death as a nameless land and rebirth as the ‘New World’ is somehow genetically encoded in all who have come to live there. The writer merely heats this monstrous history in the crucible of his mind, reduces it down to its essence and pours it into a vessel of fiction.

Since then I have become enamoured with Argentine authors. With Borges I discovered a rare path into the avant-garde, Ultraist Literary movement of the 1900’s that I thought had ended with Anais Nin and Djuna Barnes. With Gabriel Garcia-Marquez and Isabel Allende, I discovered the complexities of family lore and political turmoil and how this lay at the heart of all South American culture. Later, Roberto Bolano taught me about the kaleidoscopic ‘voices’ of the past that echo throughout the land and the way colonialism had all but destroyed the indigenous spirit of this great continent. Last year, Ernesto Guevara, another Argentine writer (and freedom fighter) showed me how all modern Latin Americans doom themselves to capitalism (the new colonialism) if they do not embrace and reconcile with that very spirit they once tried to cage and tame.

There is such a mixture of ideas, customs and cultures, that to understand Latin America, one would best remember that it does not actually belong to ‘a set’ of people, but like the elusive Jaguar, moves in the shadows of history and the wilderness of a past that refuses to die. One where the quetzalcoatl and many other gods who were considered extinct still live on, attached to Christianity and by burying themselves deeply in everyday folklore and myth.

Ghost-Writers | Artists or Posers?

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charles dickens, f. scott fitzgerald, family saga, ghostwriting, Jorge Luis Borges, nora roberts, plagiarism, stephen king, virginia andrews

Cashing in on the vampire trend: behold the offending book that’s by Virginia Andrews… and not. The word ‘ghost-writer’ never felt so ironic.  

As a serious reader hoping to make the leap into ‘serious writing’, I am constantly on the look-out for different kinds of writers. This week my thoughts turned to the subject of author, the legacy they leave behind and the how that is preserved for future readers. Many state that writing is really a form of immortality, and as a semi-serious, sometime diarist I agree. The thought of death doesn’t frighten people half as much as the possibility of being forgotten. But words have a special kind of power; they can represent a small part of the soul, and can live on long after its’ author has passed on. From cave paintings to stone tablets, from papyrus to paper; people have always found ways to justify their existence and make themselves known. So it seems that our knowledge of history always passes irrevocably through the lens of some other person’s perspective. Personally, I have always found much comfort from reading the works of deceased authors. If we take it one step further; reading is really nothing but a way to contact the dead; a method by which we can access our ever-receding past, a way to rewind time and reach the impossible. Settling down with a copy of ‘Lolita’ is akin to having a conversation with Nabokov himself. Don’t believe me? Click here and just listen to the man speak! 

Yet this week I was pretty much stumped when I came across a book that seemed to almost mock these notions. The book in question was the newly published ‘Daughter of Darkness’ by Virginia Andrews. Now, as you know I’m not the Romantic / Family Saga type, but I will admit to having read the Dollanganger series and found it to be surprisingly and even addictively
enjoyable. However, the beef I have had with her novels up till now is that she’s not the one writing them! Unfortunately Andrews died in 1986 from breast cancer having wrote only eight novels. Yet due to her massive readership and the success as a writer, her family decided to hire ghost-writer Andrew Niederman to write more stories bearing her name. Well, since then the name Virginia Andrews has continued to grace bookshelves fooling the less informed reader into thinking that she left behind a vast amount of unpublished material.  

Granted, ghost-writing is a very big industry, what with more celebrities
now publishing their biographies through these services. But I can’t seem to agree with the notion of someone else taking all the credit; whether this be the person doing all the writing, or the one whose name is being bandied around for said work. From an ethical stand-point, it raises many questions that skirt along issues like plagiarism. In fact, here’s a very interesting and informative article on the pros and cons of ghost-writing for those involved with it. Looking around the internet a bit makes it clear that business-related subjects are a more acceptable field for ghost-writing, but not so much for fiction where a writer is trying to make a name for themselves.

In the case of Virginia Andrews, ghost-writing hasn’t harmed her sales figures at all, which makes her an anomaly and a success story at the same time. Her reputation as a writer is anchored to her name, which has become a commodity over the years. Ghost-writing in this instance has managed to turn an author into a ‘brand’, much like Kelloggs or Wrigley’s chewing gum. Readers still flock to buy the ghost-written material, even though they are obviously not her own work. However the latest addition to the Andrews books seems to be the final break away from the essence of Virginia Andrews the ‘author’. Having become famous for her sprawling family sagas; it feels like a desperate and wholly tasteless move to turn to the current
trend of vampire fiction. I’m not sure how that would sit with die-hard Andrews fans; but I don’t think it’s necessarily a good thing to tamper with a writers’ legacy in this way. 

Authors today rarely jump genres, and if they do, they use a pseudonym to avoid any negative responses affecting their established identities. Stephen King, who initially went by the name Richard Bachman and Nora Roberts who sometimes writes as J.D. Robb are both well-known for doing this. For King and Roberts, the use of a pen name was a choice they made not because of any great leap in genre. Roberts is a writer of romantic fiction, and erotic thriller was practically next-door to that. Same with King; the idea for the name Richard Bachman came simply because his publishers didn’t think readers would buy more than one story a year from an author. C. S. Lewis used two different names, one for a collection of poems and another for a narrative to avoid harming his reputation as a don at Oxford University.   

So, taking the above into consideration, I see Virginia Andrews’ now ghost-written material of paranormal/ YA fiction to be the mother of all gambles as far as the world of publishing goes.

Andrews aside, I don’t know of any other author whose name has been used in quite the same way, and whose reputation has still remained in tact. Consider Jorge Luis Borges who, as much as he deserved it, was never awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (a grave injustice if you ask me). There are many like me who mourn the fact that he never wrote a novel. What would it be like if his estate hired a ghost-writer to fulfill this universal desire for all Borges fans around the world? I shudder at the thought! 

Novels like ‘The Mystery of Edwin Drood’ and ‘The Last Tycoon’ are famous for being the last unfinished works of Dickens and Fitzgerald. To literary enthusiasts they are just as precious as their completed works, even more so. So how would it feel if someone was suddenly hired to complete these works?

I suppose what I’m really trying to get at is the idea that an author’s  mind, their pattern of writing can be mimicked for the sake of making money up to a certain point. And while I find this assumption offensive, I do also acknowledge the fact that it can be terribly enticing too. Yet the mind of a person is like a fingerprint. No two are ever alike. The act of creating is fuelled by a whole slew of mental and psychological ingredients beginning with the first impressions of childhood and the influences of growing up with a particular ‘cocktail’ of people and ideologies.       

There is much to be said about the issue. What do you think? Is ghost-writing ‘fair’? Does it cheapen literature? If you are a Virginia Andrews fan who has read her ghost-written work, what do you think of the quality of it? Does it really matter? Are we conscious readers?

J. L. Borges | Garden of Forking Paths

Tags

Garden of Forking Paths, Jorge Luis Borges, Nobel Prize, The Modern World

As I’m such a fan of Borges, I thought I’d post a little blog on a great website that has a lot of information about him and his works. Besides the great Borges there are other authors that fall into the same style of writing that might be of interest. Just to note, that one of the great themes that ran throughout almost all of Borges’ works was that of the ‘labyrinth’. This was his grand metaphor, and one he would obsess about all his life. He was hailed as one of the greatest writers NEVER to have won the Nobel prize, and he was also famous for never having written a full novel. All his works are in the form of short stories… but his language is so concentrated and precise… well, it’s a bit like Ribena. Dilute before you taste! A little goes a long way.

Here it is: The Modern World – Jorge Luis Borges Page