When you saw that title, I bet you thought "Great! Finally he's going to criticise some books and not give them all glowing reviews because they were too crap to finish!" Alas, I refuse to write negative reviews of books for a number of reasons. It frustrates and annoys me to have to think of criticisms of a book I hated: most times you just get this gut feeling of dislike and throw the book across the room. Also, there's enough malicious reviewers online that probably do it better than I would.
Anyway, the reason for this post is that although I keep posting reviews of finished books, there are a few that I like to dip into every now-and-then. "Impossible!", I hear you scream, "How can you focus on four books at once!" But it is true - four books are competing for my love and admiration.
1. On Rabbits, Morality, Etc.: Selected Writings of Walter Murdoch, edited by Imre Salusinszky:
"If the essay should come to displace the novel inpopular favour, it would be a clear sign of an advance in civilisation. When we are prepared to sit down and listen to an easy, informal talk by a wise, humorous kindly observer of life, without demanding that he shall tell us a story, we shoe that we are growing up."
I know that I've just done what I hate to see other reviewers doing - quoting a passage from a book that has already been quoted in the introduction - but this really does some up what Walter Murdoch's writings were all about. His essays are there to educate first and entertain second, covering almost every topic under the sun, including tripe, being Australian, and writing. Strangely enough, I am finding this collection most enjoyable and recommend it to anyone looking for an easy non-fiction read.
2. The Best American Noir of the Century, edited by James Ellroy & Otto Penzler:
Being a great lover of crime, and especially of the novels by Raymond Chandler, I thought that purchasing this novel would help expand my reading into crime noir. But the thing of it is, the noir genre does not necessarily involve a crime - the genre focuses on the darkness of humankind, with a story featuring characters of questionable morals and their almost certain downfall. True, noir can contribute to the crime genre and vice versa, but one does not necessarily equal the other. Every short story begins with a small bio about the author, and contains works by Dorothy B. Hughes, Mickey Spillane, James Ellroy, Patricia Highsmith, Dennis Lehane and Elmore Leonard.
3. Retromania, by Simon Reynolds:
This is an intriguing look at the 'retro' trend in contemporary music by prominent punk critic Simon Reynolds. Through the book, Reynolds poses the question of what will happen to music when we run out of past to reference and steal from. He thoroughly examines different segments and fads of music history, including everything from Northern Soul and Mod Revival to the adaptation of Western music into Japanese culture and the desire to recreate and imitate the past. Make no mistake, this is not something that you can read from cover-to-cover, but it is still quite readable and accessible to anyone interested in what direction modern music is heading.
4. Submarine, by Joe Dunthorne:
Recently adapted into a film directed by The IT Crowd's Richard Ayoade, produced by Ben Stiller, and soundtracked by Alex Turner of Arctic Monkey's fame, this is the novel taking up most of my time as I tried (and failed, but only by two chapters) to finish it before seeing the film. To me, lead-character and narrator Oilver Tate seems like a cross between Nick Hornby's romantically-challenged Rob from High Fidelity, and Mark Haddon's autistic detective Christopher from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (and I love both of these novels).
Dunthorne does an amazing job of job of chanelling the absolute chaos and unpredictability of adolescence. While there are the typical scenes of growing-up (dealing with school, losing one's virginity, attempted murder of your girlfriend's dog), they are not the most important parts of the novel and don't occur when you would expect them to. This leaves an enormous amount of space for Dunthorne entertain and surprise us with the anarchy, discordance and disorder of Oliver Tate.
Here's a taste of Oliver:
'I hope you're using condoms,' he (dad) says.
I clink my spoon around the sides of my glass bowl.
'I use Trojans, America's number one,' I say.
My dad is a historian. Albeit in Welsh history. I expect him to say that I should be wary of trusting a condom brand named after a moment in history when the Greeks snuck their army - or penis - into a Trojan fort - or vagina - by hiding in a giant wooden horse - or condom - that they pretended was a gift. When the trojans got drunk, the condom split and all the Greek soldiers wriggled out and got down to some serious pillaging.
'Oh, well, right,' he says.
It's things like this that a movie cannot hope to convey to its audience...
Reading on,
George :)
