The Hobbit

Title: The Hobbit
Author: J.R.R. Tolkien
Published: 1937, this edition in 1974
Genre: Fantasy
Pages: 279. I made it to 180.


Am I giving up on The Hobbit? Am I really giving up on The motherfucking Hobbit? Apparently I am. At least for now.

Lord of the Rings was the biggest thing to hit me since learning to read when I was a kid. For years it was my favourite book. I read it long before reading The Hobbit (in Finnish) for the first time, and preferred LotR to The Hobbit. Still, I liked Bilbo's adventures.

When I was living in the UK, I found this old edition with a cover drawn by Tolkien himself, a sketch for the Death of Smaug. I was looking forward to reading it, before going to see the first Hobbit-movie.

That was my mistake. Seeing the movie. I really, really liked the LotR movies from a decade ago. I saw all of them, several times, in the movie theaters. Back when I was a poor student!  And I was really looking forward to The Hobbit -movie, since it's full of my favourite actors. EVERYONE is in it! I love Martin Freeman, he does make a perfect Bilbo. And hey, it's that vampire guy from Being Human! Sir Ian McKellen! HUGO WEAVING! Glee all around! But oh gods! The movie!

The beginning was great, the rest not so. And I get that they had to add stuff in, and Gandalf was going on about the Necromancer in the book again and again, but I just didn't like it. It was pretty and beautiful and I didn't like it. Gollum was great. When Thorin went all "Bilbo, my bro!" after the eagles? And that stuff before the eagles?! I contemplated beating myself unconscious with my empty soda bottle. I'm not looking forward to the next two movies. (Two? Two?! Three 3-hour movies from a 280-page book?!) Even if they're throwing in Stephen Fry and Benedict Cumberbatch. I don't know. I just don't know anymore...

And that is how I lost all will to finish the book right now. The movie made me want to cry, and not in a good way.

Richard

Title: Richard
Author: Ben Myers
Published: 2010 by Picador
Genre: Fictional biography
Pages: 6095 little Kindle app pages


So, umm... this isn't the truth, but it is what might have happened. This is the story of Richey Edwards, or Richey Manic, the fourth original member of the Manic Street Preachers, who disappeared 1st February 1995. 18 years ago. I personally don't remember reading/hearing about his disappearance -I do remember the 4 REAL thing though- at the time, but I was as out of current affairs then as I am now. I started to listen to the Manic's music around This is my truth tell me yours, which is still one of my favourite albums ever. Lately I've been listening to a lot of their music, and got curious.

Myers has based Richard on facts known about Richey and the Manic Street Preaches, but by his own words he has taken a lot of artistic freedoms with the story. I don't pretend to know enough of the band's background to comment on what's real or what I think is real, but I do know that this fucking book caught me by the throat and kept a tight grip until the very last page. A touching and sad story of a young man struggling with himself. Well written, too. The feelings and pain are real, even if the story isn't.

Apparently Espedair Street started some sort of a music biography trend for me: I've got two others on the To Be Read -pile.


   What once fuelled me - what drove this band of ours forwards - is now that which cripples me and renders me impotent in all ways: creatively, socially, sexually.
   Intelligence, boredom, sensitivity and despair are a deadly combination and it took weeks in an expensive rehab to tell me that all the drinking and the cutting were merely ways to stave off the deadly strain of boredom that arises when a creative ming is not put to use.
   Now that the drinking and the cutting have mostly stopped things are infinitely, noticeably, painfully worse; there is simply nothing left to stave off the boredom now. There's no brief drunken giddiness to fill the void and no hangover to drape my day over. No boozy, carefree nights out to romanticize later and get nostalgic about.

The Extra Man

Title: The Extra Man
Author: Jonathan Ames
Published: 1999 by Scribner.
Genre: Aww.
Pages:333


 Louis Ives is a young teacher in New Jersey who wants to both be a young gentleman and to wear women's clothes every now and again. He is relieved of his job when he is caught wearing a colleague's bra. Not knowing what else to do, Louis finds a room for rent in New York and moves to the big city to start a new life. His roommate is an aging writer called Henry Harrison, who moonlights as an extra man, a kind of a date to elderly rich ladies who pay for his company with food.

The big city and its wonders soon start to drag Louis off the straight and narrow, to transvestite bars and their beds. A second life which no one, least of all Henry, can find out about.

Despite all these potentially very seedy elements, The Extra Man is a very sweet book. Both Louis and Henry are intereting characters, as is their very messy apartment with letters in the fridge and cockroaches in bed. Oh, there's apparently a movie made of the book, but it hasn't gotten very good reviews. Might check it out anyway one day. As a book, I really liked this one. I was reading two other books at the same time, and all three were equally interesting and hard to put down.

It's a rough life I lead.


   "You want to live with me? Be my husband?" she asked.
   I figured that she was high on what she had snorted and that it was making her feel overly romantic. "I have a very inexpensive room right now," I said, avoiding her proposal. "I don't think I can give it up."
   "If you want to be my husband you have to live with me," she said. I didn't know what to say, so I tried to touch her again and again she pushed my hand away, and then covered her breasts with her top. Here she was proposing that we live together, but I still hadn't touched her.

After Dark

Title: After Dark
Author: Haruki Murakami
Published: 2004, and in English 2007.
Genre: Surreal fiction
Pages: 201




It's four to midnight, and Mari Asai is sitting alone in a diner when a young musician on his way to an all-night practise session joins her. They've met before, through Mari's sister Eri, who's back at home, sleeping. She's been sleeping for two months straight, now.


Mari's peaceful reading is interrupted soon again when Kaoru, who runs a love hotel comes in, asking for her by name, to come and help translate for an injured Chinese prostitute. After Dark follows Mari, the musician, Eri and the people at the love hotel through the night, the darkest hours and what they bring out of people. As usual with Murakami, things look normal on the surface, but there are strange things and coincidences just beneath, lurking in the night.


Darn, now I want to read Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World again... I like Murakami's strange, poetic worlds. The SO and I went to Italy for a holiday last week, and this was my flight-treat. Read most of it on the way back, drowning out the endless babbling from the two ladies behind us. I swear, they didn't stop for breath.





Mari thinks about what Korogi said. "I do feel that I've managed to make something I could maybe call my own world... over time... little by little. And when I'm inside it, to some extent, I feel kind of relieved. But the very fact I felt I had to make such a world probably means that I'm a weak person, that I bruise easily, don't you think? And in the eyes of society at large, that world of mine is a puny little thing. It's like a cardboard house: a puff of wind might carry it off somewhere."

Espedair Street

Title: Espedair Street
Author: Iain Banks
Published: 1987 for the first time, this edition in 1999
Genre: Biography
Pages: 249




There was a sale towards the end of last year at the local fantasy book/comic store: buy at least 4 books, and you get them for the price of one. This is how I ended up with five Iain Banks books at once, including this. Then I dragged a friend along for another round.

Daniel Weir is, at 31, a retired world-famous musician and songwriter, who is living as an unknown hermit under an alias after the band broke up, pretending to be the caretaker of a large church/townhouse he owns himself. Espedair Street follows him through his stumbling anonymity every other chapter and from a stuttering no-one to a star at the top of the world in every other... other chapter. Mr. Weird tells his story himself, and he's a very truthful and even cruel narrator. Still, there's plenty of humour and crazy rock-star antics all around.


"So I've done all that, and I got fed up with it. My dreams came true, and I discovered that once they did, they were no longer dreams, just new ways of living, with their own problems and difficulties. Maybe if I'd been working on new dreams while the old ones were coming true I could have kept going, heading for even greener hillsides, even newer pastures, but I guess I just ran out of material, or I used it all up in the songs."