Last time I talked about books 1 to 5, which you can find here.
And now - books 6 to 10.
Berzerker - Adrian Edmondson
I've been a fan of The Young Ones since it first crashed into my life in the early 80s. It made a huge impression and I've followed its main players ever since. Adrian Edmondson is, as I'm sure you're aware, one of those players.
And what a book. This is an absolute delight, and very quickly became one of my Favourite Things Ever. It is a wise and wonderful tale, told with compassion and wit, bristling with playful prose. One of the best things is, he doesn't tell his life story in strict chronological order. Good. I generally can't be bothered with autobiographies where we spend the first 200 pages watching them grow up in a council house. Get to the bit where you're famous, please.
That said, I loved all the early life stuff too. He's a great writer, and there's a loose, conversational style to the whole affair that holds your attention. It's like sitting there, listening to a very funny man tell you astounding stories until the sun goes down. He has an amazing ability to demonstrate the gentle warmth and melancholy of an older man alongside the still burning flame of his earlier, crazier self.
When I read most books, a little bit of me is watching the page count, delighting at the achievement as I near the end. Especially this year, as every book gets me one closer to my target. However. While reading this book, every page closer to the end made me a little sadder, that this beautiful, joyful book was going to come to an end.
Elevation - Stephen King
A brisk and breezy King book, which I flew through in a couple of evenings. Don't be fooled into thinking I'm a fast reader, though. I'm painfully slow. It's just that this was nice and short - practically a short story by King's standards.
It's a relatively recent work, and the old boy seems to have lightened up somewhat. My main knowledge of King is of the early stuff - The Shining, Firestarter, It, all that lot. So I'm used to the relentlessly 'horror' fixated version of Stephen King, where the reward for being a lovely, decent character is that you suffer a horrible but extremely well described death.
It's nice to see that the decades have mellowed him. This is positive, affirming and funny. Maybe he's been like this for years, while I wasn't looking. I guess I'll find out when I read more.
Lolita - Vladamir Nabakov
What a peculiar book. I'm very much glad I have read this, but I often wasn't glad to be actually reading it at the time. Not because it's badly written. Quite the opposite, if anything.
As you'll probably know, this is 'that book' that Sting was singing about in his famous song "I am trying ever so hard not to sleep with this schoolgirl". It's about a man who fancies under age girls, and it's told from his point of view. Bonkers, right? But also fascinating. Not least because you spend a lot of the time thinking, "Who allowed this book? It feels like this book shouldn't be allowed. Am I allowed to be reading this book?"
The book is inherently critical of it's pervy protagonist, but that's subtext. The actual stuff of the writing is the narrator describing how much he fancies Lolita. And he's very good at describing things and making them sound sexy. Stop it, narrator. Socks aren't sexy. Except you make them sound like they are, and you're very good with words. God damn it.
Anyway, the main message is 'don't go out with underage teenage girls'. Never mind the moral issues - they sound like absolute nightmares. They'll be very mean to you, and say some very hurtful things, and mock all the stuff that you think is cool, and you'll never get a handle on their moods.
(But also do mind the moral issues, obviously).
You Are What You Watch - Walter Hickey
I like books about popular culture and how it reflects ideologies, and how our brains make sense of stuff. So I found lots in this book to like. It's fun when books talk about television, because I've seen lots of television, and so I feel less stupid for a while.
This is a bit of a mess, though. If it had a focus, I couldn't work out what it was. There'd be an amazing bit on how out brains interpret the visual information sent by our eyes, and how that explains how we tell stories. And then some seemingly aimless wandery nonsense about statistics that I didn't care about.
Was it just that I wasn't properly paying attention? Well let's not rule that out. But I came away with the impression that the brief was 'write down everything that you've ever thought, referring occasionally to films and TV, until you hit the word count." If that was the brief, then well done, mission accomplished.
A Study In Scarlet - Arthur Conan Doyle
Another shameful omission. I had never read a Sherlock Holmes story in my life. Ridiculous, eh? I look like the kind of person who should have a big collection of all the Sherlock Holmes books, sitting on my shelf in the correct order, next to my replica pipe and magnifying glass. Well. Turns out I am as much of a nerd as you think, but also much lazier than you realised.
So I made my first foray into the world of Conan Doyle. I know about Holmes, of course. I've seen various films and TV adaptations, most strikingly the recentish Moffat/Cumberbach incarnation. All very enjoyable, but I knew they were modernised to appeal to my easily distracted brain. What would the book be like? Full of... I don't know, old stuff. Long sentences. Horses. People staring at wallpaper for fun.
Anyway, it's very good, obviously. Conan Doyle's prose style is way snappier than I'd expected. I was amazed that Holmes was every bit as weird and waspish as Cumberbach's version. He was funny. Alert. Not the stuffy old patrician I'd expected. Also, the book takes a thoroughly bizarre turn half way through and jumps to a seemingly different story, in America, featuring totally different characters. It's as if David Lynch has taken over, and it's great. And then at the end it goes back to Sherlock Holmes saying, "So anyway that's why all the murders happened," and that's the end of the book. Glorious.
That's all for now. See you next time, for five more books I read and at least partially understood.
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