Tag: 2018-man-booker-longlist • BookLikes

text 2018-08-30 16:11

Just when I think my Halloween Bingo reading list is stable...

...I wander into Waterstones to pick up a hardback copy of "The Readers Of Broken Wheel Recommend" because my wife and I decided that a book as good as this deserves to be on the shelf and not just on the iPad. While I'm waiting Waterstones tempt me with this:

the last children of tokyo

The cover is exquisite. The plot is intriguing;

"Yoshiro thinks he might never die. A hundred years old and counting, he is one of Japan's many 'old-elderly'; men and women who remember a time before the air and the sea were poisoned, before terrible catastrophe prompted Japan to shut itself off from the rest of the world. He may live for decades yet, but he knows his beloved great-grandson - born frail and prone to sickness - might not survive to adulthood. Day after day, it takes all of Yoshiro's sagacity to keep Mumei alive.

As hopes for Japan's youngest generation fade, a secretive organisation embarks on an audacious plan to find a cure - might Yoshiro's great-grandson be the key to saving the last children of Tokyo?"

YokoTawadaP1040207 It's by Yōko Tawada, a Japanese writer, currently living in Berlin. She writes in both Japanese and German and is probably best known for her "Memoirs Of A Polar Bear".

So, "The Last Children Of Tokyo" now becomes my choice for the "Doomsday" square in Halloween Bingo.

I suspect it won't be the last change.

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text 2018-08-28 09:25

Reading progress update: I've read 2%. - I should stay silent but...

Mike Finn

...removing quotation marks around direct speech is not innovative or doing something daring with form. It's annoying and discourteous to the reader.

I know that makes me sound like the grammar police but punctuation serves a purpose.

You'll be reminded of its purpose when you read a novel like this that ostentatiously leaves out quotation marks. Your reading slows down. You have to work harder to know not just who is speaking but whether anyone is speaking.

This is the writing equivalent of Brexit: I can see what it destroys but I don't see any benefits or any compelling reason to do it.

Rant over. I'll go back to the book now. Which is quite good by the way.

Kindle mainstream fiction 2018 man booker longlist

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review 2018-08-11 08:30

"Snap" by Belinda Bauer - a first-rate thriller and a pleasant surprise on the 2018 Man Booker Longlist

Mike Finn

"Snap" was my second Man Booker Longlist read. As soon as I started it, I felt like I was in 'familiar territory - albeit well-written familiar territory.

"Snap" is an evocatively written thriller that starts with one timeline in 1998 about a pregnant mother vanishing from the motorway after her car broke down and another timeline in 2001 with a pregnant woman at home alone when someone breaks in.

The chapters are short, immersive and paced to maximise the tension. I knew the two timelines must intersect but part of the fun was not knowing how.

"Snap" is just the sort of thriller I'd choose to buy. but I was at a loss to understand why it was on the Man Booker Longlist. Were they doing fun, accessible, genre reads now?

I rapidly reached the halfway point in the novel, ("Snap" was hard to put down) but I still didn't really know what was going on, even though the two storylines had finally collided in a completely surprising and deeply intriguing way.

Yet NOT knowing but REALLY WANTING to know and being confident that you will eventually find out and when you do it will be something surprising but that feels true and finally makes sense of all of the angst and pain, is the essence of what makes a thriller a thriller.

"Snap" has best-seller written all over it from page one. It took me to the second half of the book to understand Mann Booker's interest: it is deeply rooted in the characters of the people who are entangled in the events: their faults, their fears, their deepest desires. It is about the impact of abandonment, the need for hope and the power of a constantly refilled cistern of anger that HAS to escape somehow.

"Snap" isn't one of those one-shot, I-didn't-see-THAT-coming trickster thrillers that were once fun but that now feel so me-too that I eschew them. This is a thriller where the plot is pushed by emotion rather than the mechanics of a police procedural novel.

The main characters are children: resourceful but damaged, surviving but not thriving. constantly feeling the loss of the life that was stolen from them the day their mother disappeared It seemed to me that the story took on the wish-fulfilment magic that children use to cope with the unbearable. The police are also a little child-like, bumbling along, powered by ego and opinion and replacing best practice with intuition and testosterone.

Throughout the story, the young boy dreams that he has found his mother. In his sleep, he returns to the day that, as he thinks of it, he failed to find her. The dreams are a painful mix of guilt, anger and grief.

It seems to me that these dreams, the boy's guilt, his bone-deep need to make things better, his conviction that he will fail, set the tone for the novel.

The ending may be a little too fairytale to satisfy fans of hard-bitten crime stories but it felt appropriate to me. While it's at the borders of the plausible, it's exactly where it needs to be to make those dreams no more than a memory.

I recommend "Snap" both as a thriller and a strong Mann Booker contestant.

I wonder, if it wins the Man Booker, will it sell fewer copies than if it had been given the usual "this is Gillian Flynn on steroids" hype?

crime Kindle 2018 man booker longlist

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review 2018-08-08 00:42

"The Water Cure" by Sophie Mackintosh - abandoned after 25% - too worthy for me. I don't want my reading to be a chore.

Mike Finn

I picked "The Water Cure" as one of four books to read from the 2018 Man Booker Longlist. I liked the speculative fiction premise of young women, raised in isolation in a post-apocalyptic world, encountering men for the first time and having to reconsider what they think they know.

"The Water Cure" got off to a slow and difficult start but was intriguing enough to keep me interested. I liked the rapid succession of short chapters, written from the point of view of each of the three sisters. This worked well in the audiobook version I read, where each sister get's her own narrator.

The we-only-know-this-island innocence of the sisters means that they take their exotic situation for granted and do little to explain it to the reader.

It soon became clear that this was not going to be your typical post-apocalyptic dystopian novel. I was reminded more of "The Tempest" if Miranda had had two sisters.

After the ten per cent mark, I started to get bored and a little angry. I got bored because, although many short chapters shot by, NOTHING HAPPENED in any of them except the young women sharing the details of the strange rituals (called therapies) that dominate their lives. I became angered by the abuse these young women had suffered.

I get the need to pace the book so that I can FEEL the stifling effects on the sisters of isolation and ignorance combined with forced ritual intimacy, but enough already.

I began to feel as if I were trapped in the middle of a front row at "Waiting For Godot" and I'm so embarrassed by what other people will think of me that I stay in my seat long after my boredom threatens to be terminal and I suspect Beckett of being a sadist with a wicked sense of humour.

I made it as far as the twenty-five percent mark because the voices of the sisters were strong and distinct and because I could no more look away from the spectacle of the Bennet sisters transported to an island where they are subjected to abuse that they've educated to understand as sympathetic magic, than I could look away from a building about to be demolished by well-placed charges.

I'd hoped that the arrival of the men would change the pace but it didn't and I finally admitted to myself that I was reading this book because it was "worthy" rather than because I was getting anything out of it. I'd promised myself I wouldn't do that anymore so I abandoned "The Water Cure" at twenty-five per cent mark.

It may win the Mann Booker prize but it didn't make a place for itself in my imagination.

Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample of the book.

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speculative fiction audio book mainstream fiction 2018 man booker longlist

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text 2018-07-27 19:08

Reading progress update: I've read 15%.: I'm growing impatient now

Mike Finn

"The Water Cure" is becoming a bit of a tease.

I get the need to pace the book so that I can FEEL the stifling effects of isolation and ignorance combined with forced ritual intimacy, but enough already.

I'm beginning to feel like I'm trapped in the middle of a front row at "Waiting For Godot" and I'm so embarrassed by what other people will think of me that I stay in my seat long after my boredom threatens to be terminal and I suspect Beckett of being a sadist with a wicked sense of humour.

I'm hanging on because the voices of the characters are strong and because I can no more look away from the spectacle of the Bennet sisters transported to an island where they are subjected to abuse that they've educated to understand as sympathetic magic, than I can look away from a building about to be demolished by well-placed charges.

But I NEED SOMETHING TO HAPPEN.

One more hour. Then either the story moves on or I do.

speculative fiction audio book mainstream fiction 2018 man booker longlist