27. Between the assassinations by Aravind Adiga

 For Ramin Bahrani

When I saw this book and whom it was written by, I was quite excited to read it as I enjoyed his other book, The White Tiger. At the beginning, I wasn’t disappointed – Adiga’s vivid portrayal of characters and setting were great. However, the story then changed and I thought ‘Okay, new characters and story, no problem, perhaps these stories will interlink somehow’. However, I cottoned on that this wasn’t going to happen and that these were short stories. I was disappointed as I don’t like short stories. I haven’t really thought about why I don’t like short stories before and I think it is because I feel as if I get nothing back after investing my time into caring about the characters and the plot. A short story just cuts it… well, short, and it doesn’t satisfy me. I like to immerse myself in a book and be transported to another world for a time. Although short stories can do this to a point, it’s just not long enough for me to spend in that world. However, being the professional that I am, I stoicly read on to the end. Putting my dislike of short stories aside, Adiga pulls it out of the bag. The stories are all set in a coastal town called Kittur, a ficitional place. The beginning of the book has a Contents page which looks like a page from another book. The stories are labelled by either a morning, afternoon or evening and split over 7 days, suggestive of a travel itinerary. Each story begins with a description of a part of a town, again like a travel book. By setting the book in this way, the author makes the reader feel like a tourist which, in some way, you are. The short stories are about the corruption, the injustice and the hypocracy in India. They look at the caste system and the conflict between Hindus and Muslims. They also look at the complacency and the hypocracy of the middle classes. As reader, you ultimately are a tourist, dipping into this world, being shown how terrible it is and then you dip out back to real life.

As with a collection of short stories, some are more poignant than others. The stories are sad and none of them have a happy ending. The collection is vivid and heart-breaking and tries to expose the poverty and hardships in India and how people will tread on one another to survive. However, as I got nearer the end, I became tired of reading the same story repeatedly, which made me wonder if I am heartless or a product of the world we live in? Perhaps Adiga is trying to shake the complacency of my comfortable life and to galvanise me to take action?  If this is the case, is he also a hypocrite for making money out of these miseries or a hero for bringing these cases to light? Or maybe, like his characters in the book, we humans are not that black and white.

26. A walk across the sun by Corban Addison

For the uncountable number of souls held captive in the sex trade. And for the heroic men and women across the globe wroking tirelessly to win their freedom

When I go to the library for this reading challenge, I always pick up books in pairs and the coincidental pairing is always interesting. This book couldn’t get any further from the previous one and yet they both say something about being a female. As you can tell from the dedication (which by the way, is the most admirable yet), this book is about the sex trade and the exploitation of vulnerable women and girls. The story is set in India and it is about two sisters: Ahalya aged 17 and Sita aged 15. Their family and their home are ripped apart by a tsumani and they try to reach their covent school for safety. On their way, they are kidnapped and sold to brothel owners. The story intercuts with another – this one is set in Washington and a lawyer named Thomas Clarke is trying to cope after the death of his infant daughter and his wife leaving him. After a major case he is working on collapses, he decides to take a sabbatical to India and work for an anti-trafficking charity. Whilst at the charity, Thomas hears of Ahalya and Sita’s case and goes on a mission to rescue them. This brings him to various places whilst Sita is sold to various gangs across the world. It is a very harrowing story and contrasts starkly with the fluffiness of the previous book.What makes it more poignant is that you know that even though this story is fiction, similar things are happening around the world. At the end of the story, the author mentions that the fictional charity that he uses in the book is simliar to the International Justice Mission.

What Addison does really well is conveying characters and their clear motivations for them to do what they do. He is very good at creating suspense and kept me on the edge of my seat. He is unforgiving in what he lets happen to these girls but he does it without sensationalising. He was very careful to make it authentic as he says that modern slavery is horrifying enough. This is a very good book, telling a story that needs to be told.

 

25. It had to be you by Ellie Adams

To Dad,

for sponsoring the arts

Well the inscription is ironic. This book is about as far as away as it can be from ‘the arts’. This is another chick-lit and you may have noticed by now that I do not like this genre. I have asked myself why I don’t like these kinds of books as I like the silliness of female caricatures on screen (like Clueless or Drop dead diva). I’ve been racking my brains trying to work out why books are different and I think it’s because it feels like the author is preaching to me, as if they are telling me how to be a woman. In films or TV, I can laugh at the over-the-top characters whilst sympathising with them. However, in books, the author comes out with ridiculous statements of how to be a woman or how to be a man. In this book, the author implies that there must be something wrong with men who drink Smirnoff Ice (FFS!) and uses popular cultures as similies. She refers to someone having an undercut ten years before Miley Cyrus (and by the way, the undercut existed many years before then) and referring to someone who shouts in the same way as Len Goodman shouting ‘seven’ (if you don’t know who Len Goodman is, you’re not missing much). It is a serious crime against English Literature. The worst thing about this book and other Chick-Lit books is that they undermine women – they always write about women with vacuous jobs (PR, fashion) who experience a man leaving them (in various ways, eg. death, dumping, divorce) and how they cope (or don’t) until another man comes into their life (usually a friend or someone they hate until they realise their true feelings) and then live happily ever after. Why can’t a woman be single and happy or why can’t female protagonists be more interesting.

The weird thing is, is that as I read it, I slowly got into it. Without my consent, this book had somehow made me like it. I still felt irritated by detailed descriptions of what a character was wearing which had no bearing on the story, and that the author might think I like that sort of thing, what with being a girl and all… I’m still baffled about what I liked about this book. Maybe it was the characters? Maybe because the protagonist had already got her man halfway through the book and the story didn’t end there, or maybe (and most probably the most accurate option) is that I was so horrified by the beginning by the crimes against literature, that my expectations couldn’t get any lower. The saccharin ending was like an awful rom com film that completely over-killed the happily ever after idiom. However, I still enjoyed it and that is most worring indeed.

 

24. The Eden Legacy by Will Adams

To Robert, Eleanor and Grace

Fortunately, I managed to read the books in the correct order. This is the sequel to the Lost Labyrinth. Without giving too much away, the main protagonist, Daniel Knox is now living under a new identity. He works as an underwater archeologist for a British firm, searching for ruins of a Chinese shipwreck in Madagascar. Looking for revenge, Daniel spends his time researching the Nergazedes on the internet which leads them to him. Unbeknownst to him, they send a hitman to kill him whilst he tries to find a missing friend and her father who disappeared from a boat.

Rebecca Kirkpatrick flies back home to find her missing sister and father. She meets Daniel and they both try to find her missing family. Meanwhile, the hitman and his accomplice try to find Daniel. In true action story fashion, it builds to a climax near the end. I’ll stop talking about the plot so as not to give anything away. It was an entertaining read and it made a nice change to read a story set in Madagascar. There isn’t really much more to say about this book, unfortunately. There wasn’t anything awful or particularly amazing about it. It was just an easy read which unfortunately means that I haven’t got much to say about it.

23. The Lost Labyrinth by Will Adams

To Robert, Eleanor and Grace

When I choose an image for a book, I always try and get the same front cover as I the one on the copy I read. As you can see from this cover, it said ‘If you like Dan Brown, then you’ll love Will Adams’. My heart sank when I read this. However, I was pleasantly wrong.  The idea of an ancient myth being possibly real is a great concept and this is where the similarity to Dan Brown ends. It is very different to Dan Brown, in that it is well written, Adams has a firm grasp on grammar and the clues aren’t from Scoobie Doo.

The main character, an archeologist called Daniel Knox, becomes embroiled in a Georgian mafia’s scheme to find the golden fleece after encountering a long-lost archeologist dying in his friend’s hotel room in Greece. The head of the mafia, Ilya Nergadze sends his psychopathic grandson, Mikhail to find the Golden Fleece to bolster his popularity during the elections (a bit far-fetched, I know). Mikhail is a nasty piece of work and there are torture scenes in this book which seem a bit gratuitous. It did, however, make me want Mikhail to get what he deserved.

It also seems a bit far-fetched that an archeologist can escape and outwit hired professional members of the mafia but again, it is fiction so I’m willing to contort my suspension of disbelief. The plot in the beginning and in the middle is entertaining and keeps the reader on their toes. The ending is a bit of a cop-out in a way, although tempting readers about the Golden Fleece and not delivering would be disappointing, but the ending isn’t very well thought-out.

There aren’t many clever writing devices here, but overall, it is just an entertaining book. You don’t have to think about it and you can easily get into it after a hard day’s work. This is great for commuting.

22. Watership Down by Richard Adams

To Juliet and Rosamond, remembering the road to Stratford-on-Avon

Ah Watership Down. Finally, I’ve come across a classic. I’ve read it before but had sort of forgotten it, although there were one or two sections of the book that I remembered. I had seen the cartoon too and also vaguely remembered it. I was very surprised at how good the book is.

The story begins with Fiver, a small rabbit who has an awful vision that he can’t interpret but he knows that the rabbits must leave their warren immediately to avoid a tragedy. No one believes him apart from his brother, Hazel and they manage to convince a small number of rabbits, including one Bigwig, to join them and set off on a journey. A journey always makes a good story, in which the journey taken is not just the physical one. It’s the perfect tool for character change. As we all know, being out in the open away from the warren can be a very dangerous place indeed for rabbits, so this story is about how the rabbits try to find a suitable place to live, whilst traversing all the dangers they encounter, then finding female rabbits to reproduce with. The book culminates in Bigwig, one of the protagonists, trying to liberate female rabbits by infiltrating a prison-like warren dictated by a ruthless leader called General Woundwort. As the name suggests, the General organises his warren like a prison guarded by regiments and there is a clear hierarchy of power. Each rabbit is bitten and depending on where he is bitten, he is allocated into a Mark, a group of rabbits who are guarded by officers and sentries who are overlooked by a Captain. Above the Captain are the Council rabbits who look after an area in the warren, e.g. one is responsible for feeding, one for breeding etc. Similar to a dictatorship in real life, the ordinary rabbits suffer whilst the ones in power have privileges, which makes ordinary rabbits aspire to become an officer, which self-perpetuates the whole system. This book is about survival and it makes for great reading.

Adams clearly did his research about rabbits and he credits the book The Private Life of the Rabbit written by, and very respectfully referred to as Mr R M Lockley. What was good about this book was that not only did I believe that these were actually rabbits I was imagining, but Adams managed to make me care and sympathise with these rabbits as if they were human characters. It is a very clever device as I was totally consumed by the action and willed the rabbits to succeed in sticky situations. The way Adams did this was by using the usual character devices: insight into characters’ feelings and motivations, distinctive character traits and idiosyncratic ways of speaking. Even the peripheral characters have one or two sentences about them that sum up who they are which is emphasised by their actions. What made the rabbits comparable to humans was that Adams gives them a language and a belief system. Like other writers who try to create a different world, Adams copies Tolkien by giving the rabbits their own language so that we humans, have to be told what each lupine term means. He does this by using footnotes to tell us how to pronounce words and their definition. The rabbits also tell each other stories of El-ahrairah, a cheeky and mischievous rabbit who was the prince of the rabbits. Like a naughty child, he tries to avoid and outwit Frith, the creator of the world. El-ahrairah reminds me of the Monkey King (the cheeky monkey in the 70’s cult classic Monkey Magic or for the more literary, the cheeky monkey in the Journey to the West, one of the four great classical novels in Chinese literature) as he is naughty but ultimately a good rabbit. The myths inspire the rabbits in their plans to help them ro rescue female rabbits from General Woundwort. At one particularly tense fight in which Bigwig is blocking the entrance to his warren against General Woundwort, Bigwig’s friend, Bluebell is telling a story about El-ahrairah talking to a fox to calm the does. It is a vicious fight and when General Woundwort is winning, he tries to get Bigwig to join his side. This is when Adams mixes the dialogue between General Woundwort and Bigwig with El-ahrairah and the fox. This is the only time in the book when the myths and the main story collide. It creates drama and suspense and works very well. He also uses other stories to reflect the action in the main story – every chapter begins with a quote from other writers such as Shakespeare and Yeats.

I could go on (and I clearly have) but I realise that this may bore some readers so I’ll cut it short. Adams’ sense of drama and how he manipulates the story and its format is very clever. The urgency of life and death and how one desperate plan relies on another and how each intersperes one with another, makes for a gripping read. So much so, that I missed my stop on the train and had to get off the next station. I also ran the risk of walking into lamposts by trying to read whilst walking to work. For me, this is clearly a sign of a great book.

 

 

 

21. The Clown Service by Guy Adams

To Agents “Loorbins” and “Drudles”, for their consistent support in the fireld. Mission accomplished.

Well, what an interesting book. This is about a secret agent called Toby who gets relegated to Section 37, an intelligence service specialising in the paranormal. Now hold on, don’t go away just yet. This is an enjoyable book. It is set in London for one, and so differs from the usual American paranormal government story. There is a character called August Shining, who is effectively the British Mulder, and his bolshy sister; Jamie, who has to get out of his face to travel to astral planes; an ex-wrestler who has built a kind of travel machine; and where would a good spy book be without a crazy Russian man bent on world destruction?

It is written by the same author whose book I read previously. Like the previous book, it uses classic devices such as prophetic statement to arouse the reader’s interest. The book switches from 1960s to present day and between various locations. To help the reader orientate where she is, Adams states location and date before each section. Adams also plays with perspective, changing it from 3rd to 1st and back to 3rd again. He keeps up the pace by switching from story to story and each section ends on a cliff-hanger leaving the reader wanting more – Dickens would be pleased.

As the action picked up the pace, so did the structure of the novel. Adams made each section shorter so they became more like scenes in a film. I really enjoyed this book and whizzed through it. Like a film, there was a suggestion of a sequel, I hope there is.

19. The stepmother by Carrie Adams

For Roxana, Ruby Ann and Reva.

Light, love and strength regained.

Well, I was surprised at this one. Like everyone, I judged a book by its cover – its pink, pink cover. The colour and the picture of a woman striking a pose in her heels didn’t inspire much confidence that this was going to be a good book; this was a typical chick-lit book through and through. Since the last chick-lit book I read didn’t inspire me, but just made me angry, I thought this would happen again. Like the last chick-lit book, I tried to hide the cover on public transport as it was embarrassing to be seen reading this kind of book. After I got over the embarassment of the cover, this book surprised me – I actually enjoyed it. I think the reason was because it wasn’t the usual fluff about a single woman who can’t get a man but somehow does in the end.

This book tells of a single mum who has three daughters. She wants to get back together with her ex but he has another girlfriend who becomes his fiance. This book is told in two voices, one being the single mum, the other the ex’s fiance. It details the difficulties from both sides, each thinking the other is perfect, and how the children react to the new situation. What makes this book more gritty than the run-of-the-mill family dramas, is that the mother turns to alcohol to cope. Undoubtedly, the situation gets out of hand and the eldest daughter bears the brunt of her mother’s alcoholism. What worked well was that the reader saw the mother’s denial from her perspective and how easy it is not to see the effect of her actions on her daughters. Both women are well-rounded so they are believable and the interplay between them and the children is also well-portrayed. There are no clever literary devices used, it was a very easy read and I sped through it. There are some saccharin moments in this book which were quite unbelievable at times but I was willing to forgive these as, on the whole, this book was enjoyable to read. It won’t make you see the world in a different light, but it will make your commute more tolerable.

18. Lyrics Alley by Leila Aboulela

For my father, Fuad Mustafa Aboulela (1928-2008) in tribute to his love for his family. And in memory of his cousin Hassan Awad Aboulela (1922-1962), whom he spoke of often. May Allah Almighty grant them mercy.

The eagle eyed readers amongst you will see that I have gone back to AB, after AC. Much to my dismay, I found this book sitting on the shelf, staring at me when I went to get more books. Clearly this one was preivously out on loan, so here I am again at AB. Oh well. It wasn’t much of a chore to be honest as this book was rather good. I didn’t realise that this book was good until a few pages in. I was on an underground train, on my way to work and had to stop reading to get off at my stop. Whilst I waited to get off the train, I suddenly realised that I had just been transported to another world through an image of Sudan. I had been sitting in a room in Sudan with sunlight streaming through the windows and onto yellow dusty walls, surrounded by exotic things. You can imagine the rude awakening I received when I suddenly I found myself in an underground station in London.

This book is based on the writer’s second cousin, a poet who became a quadriplegic through an accident. Although one of the protagonists is based on this cousin and his poems were used in the book, this is mostly a work of fiction. This is about a family and their battles within their relationships together, mostly focussing on Nur (the poet) and Soraya (his cousin who is betrothed to Nur), Hajjah (Nur’s mother) and Nabilah (who is also married to Hajjah’s husband) and above all of this is Mahmoud, the patriarch of the family (Nur’s father, Soraya’s uncle, Hajjah’s husand and Nabilah’s husband). It reminds me of The House of the Mosque, with its interweaving of characters and their relationships within a muslim family.

What makes this book enjoyable is how the author narrates a character’s thoughts and how well it is done. As a reader, you really are inside that person’s mind, you understand their thoughts, ambitions, hopes, and emotions. To do this well, each character has to be well thought-out with an idiosyncratic voice, and thses voices have to fit within the context of the story.

What I found interesting is that for a while, I thought that the writer was a man. It was only when I looked at the front cover half-way through the book that I discovered the writer was a woman (I try not to look at the cover or the blurb at the back as I try not to judge a book by its cover). This surprised me and I’m not entirely sure why that is, I think maybe because she writes men so well.

This is a bitter-sweet book about lost love and the love of literature. Similar to the House of the Mosque, the story is set in a country that is on the verge of change. Bringing in an element of historical fact somehow makes the story more real.

17. Pigs Foot by Carlos Acosta

Para Berta y tia Lucia, ambas victimas de la misma enfermedad. Y Para Charlotte y Aila

Well I did a Google translate and it says “For Berta and aunt (or girl) Lucia both victims of the same disease. And for Charlotte and Aila”. Now obviously as it’s Google Translate, I will take this dedication with a pinch of salt as Google Translate isn’t known for its accuracy. However, it does make me wonder and it sounds like a sad dedication. If this dedication is accurate, is it a disease as in an actual disease, or is Acosta using this word figuratively, in the way that greed or ignorance can be seen as a disease, for example?

Anyway, back to the book. This again was a refreshing read after the dry spell of Ackroyd’s books. Like the previous book, it is set in a different culture. This time, it takes place in Cuba and the fictional story is set against the real political backdrop of the time. The story opens with the narator immediately talking to the reader which is a powerful device to grab the reader’s attention. The narrator’s voice is very strong and he takes us through his ancestors’ story starting from the 1800s, just before slavery was abolished in Cuba.

However, as the story goes on, the narrator’s voice became weaker. Don’t get me wrong, this is still a strong and enjoyable story but the narrator gets a little weaker in comparison. I also enjoyed the story of his ancestors more than his own story. The story then becomes quite surreal but I won’t give it away. All in all, the book is an enjoyable read and makes the commute bearable.

What is interesting about this book is that the writer is the Carlos Acosta, the famous ballet dancer. It is always interesting (and a little annoying) when I encounter someone who excels at more than one thing. All I want is to write and publish a book. Maybe I should try ballet.