Rum Punch

Title: Rum Punch
Author: Elmore Leonard
Published: 1992, then 2011 in ebook format
Genre: Crime and punishment
Pages: 4132 little Kindle pages


It's my unwritten yearly new years' resolution (well it was until now) that I'll read more books than I did last year. Because reading is fun and all that. It's 13th of January now, and I'm down two books! Not bad, considering how much work I've also done in the last two weeks...

Rum Punch is probably better known as its movie version Jackie Brown, directed by Quentin Tarantino. One of my favourite movies. As it turns out, it makes for excellent reading as well. I didn't find out until I was about 75% through with it that Rum Punch is actually kind of a sequel to another book where we first meet the characters of Ordell Robbie and Louis Gara. I'm gonna have to check that out sometime.

There are of course some differences between the book and the movie, but I think that they both work pretty well. Or then I just don't want to say anything bad about a movie I've liked so much for so many years. But, even though I've seen it plenty of times, I was still hooked to the book, knowing what would -most likely- happen next. Leonard's writing is pretty straight-forward, not much with the pondering of deeper motivations and such, but the characters still come through clear. Plus, there's plenty of humour.

My one and only disappointment is that the line "What the fuck happened to you, man? Shit, your ass used to be beautiful!" is only in the movie. (It's "What's wrong with you, Louis?" He said, "Shit, you use to be a beautiful guy, you know it?" in the book so I don't really mind all that much.)

Making History

Title: Making History
Author: Stephen Fry
Published: 1996, this edition in 2011 by Random House
Genre: What If history
Pages: 572 + acknowledgements


Santa, who had obviously reading my Wish list carefully, brought me this. And I loved it.

Michael Young, a student in Cambridge, just finishing his history thesis, runs by accident and whirling winds to an old Jewish professor, who takes great interest in his thesis subject matter: the big bad himself, Adolf Hitler. As they become frieds, Michael ends up helping Leo with the old man's obsession: a world without Hitler. But messing with history is never a good idea, is it?

Mr. Fry sure knows how to put words one after another, and Making History was so much fun to read I didn't want to put it down even when I was falling asleep or meant to get off the bus. Or back to work. I was complaining to the SO yesterday that I have only 200 pages left, it's almost over! But it was so worth it. And the ending made be let out a big Awwww! Or it would have,had I not been sitting in a bus.

But what do I do now that it's over?


He takes possession of the fat bundle of tyre-marked, torn, scrunched and grit-pocked papers and places them carefully on the table, gently smoothing out the top page as he speaks. 'So Michael Young. Would you say that you knew more about the young Adolf Hitler than anyone else alive?'

THE BLOODY LIST

After dark - Haruki Murakami

Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

Animal Farm - George Orwell

Bad dirt - Annie Proulx

Book of Human Skin - Michelle Lovric

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

Bury my heart at Wounded Knee - Dee Brown

Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

Cat’s Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut 

Christopher and his kind - Christopher Isherwood

Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess

Company-books – Kage Baker (what I haven’t read already)

Dracula - Bram Stoker

Dune - Frank Herbert

Foucault’s pendulum - Umberto Eco
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley

Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell

Gormenghast - Mervyn Peake

Hypnotisoija - Lars Kepler

If on a winter’s night a traveler - Italo Calvino

Interpreter of Maladies - Jhumpa Lahiri

Jonathan Strange ja Herra Norrell - Susanna Clarke

Matkakirjeitä Maasta - Mark Twain

Meren katedraali - Ildefonso Falcones

Mysterious Skin - Scott Heim

Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

Ole luonani aina - Kazuo Ishiguro

Oman elämänsä sankari - John Irving

One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Poikani Kevin - Lionel Shriver

Puhdistus - Sofi Oksanen

Pyat books – Michael Moorcock

Querelle - Jean Genet

Rum Punch - Elmore Leonard

Ruusun nimi - Umberto Eco

Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie

Sinuhe Egyptiläinen - Mika Waltari

The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

The Children of Hurin - J.R.R. Tolkien

The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

Try - Dennis Cooper (I’ve TRIED to read this twice. It keeps fighting me)

Tähtien Turvatit - Zachris Topelius

Täällä Pohjantähden alla - Väinö Linna

Ulysses - James Joyce

White Teeth - Zadie Smith

Bold – I own this book already.

I've surely forgotten one or many, but this is a good start! The bolded ones aren't the only books I own that I haven't read, but... it's a good start?

Please, feel free to add your recommendations in comments! :) Edjucate this idiot!

Books I maybe ought to read

Okay, so. The thing is, I buy a lot of second-hand books. I bought about 40 books in 2012, and only two of them were full price and completely new. Rest were either used or on sale. Many were from Amazon's affiliates, and cost only the postage.

What this means is, I always have a large pile of books I should get around to reading, but since there are always new shiny ones around, I never do, and the pile gets higher. I may have a problem here.

That's one reason for the following list. Another is that, I want to broaden my mind, learn new things, see things from different point-of-views. Learn history! So, after asking suggestions from people I know and reading through various lists of Books People Should Read Before They Die, and inspired by the blog Sivulliset, I made my own list here. I'm making the list its own separate file so I can easily find it and stuff. Note which one's I've read.

The point of it is not to make reading a chore. It's basically a reminder, Hey, I still haven't read that, how about now? And I'm not setting any deadlines or whipping myself if I never finish the list. I am making a note of that because I tend to get obsessive about this kind of things, stressed out etc. But yeah! The LIST!

Oh, before I go, THANK YOU's for suggestions go to Katja and Riikka, who don't have blogs (that I know of), to Heli, Heidi and the ladies of Sivulliset. I've also found many, many intriguing ones from Sivukirjasto. Thanks, ladies!

2012 in books

Happy New Year! I'm very early with this! Ha!



The first book you read in 2012:
Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood, which was a christmas present in 2011. 

The last book you finished in 2012:
Orlando by Virginia Woolf. Some class at both ends! Don’t I feel all sophisticated and shit. ;)

The first book you will finish (or did finish!) in 2013:
Of the two I’m reading now, I think it will be Stephen Fry’s Making History, which was also a christmas present, but in 2012. Man, Santa really knows what I like. 

Your favorite “classic” you read in 2012:
Umm, I’d count Orlando and Goodbye to Berlin above there as classics, as well as Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5, but as much as I enjoyed them, I think the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes are going to take the title of Favourite. I am always a little wary of classics, probably due to being forced to read books in school or something. Or short attention span, I don’t know. Every classic I’ve read, though, I’ve enjoyed, so I should read more of them. Edjucate myself a little. Typo intentional. 

The book series you read the most volumes of in 2012:
I read three books of Kage Baker’s Company-series, the first three, but if we count each short Sherlock Holmes –story as one, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective wins hands down, with ~12 short stories per collection, of which I read two. Plus one longer story, so, about 25 shorties. If not, it’s Mrs. Baker. 

The genre you read the most in 2012:
Throwing a wild guess here, I think it’s those pesky detective stories. 

The book that disappointed you:
John Niven’s Kill your friends, which I bought for the title and because it was praised as the new Trainspotting. The first fifty pages were just… ego-wanking, and while I understand that it was the writer’s intention, I just didn’t like it.

The book you liked better than you expected to:
There were a few, I think, but let’s go with Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5. I’d wanted to give Vonnegut a go for a while, since one of my favourites, Chuck Palahniuk, is so often compared to him. I thought I’d just read a few pages, no pressure, but ended up wanting to read more. I’m definitely going to be reading more Vonnegut in the future.

The hardest book you read in 2012 (topic or writing style):
I had issues with only a few books, and purely for their pacing. Kage Baker’s Mendoza in Hollywood seemed to drone on and on, and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando could get really long-winded, although it didn’t make me want to put it down. And I’m fairly sure I’d have liked Mendoza more if I’d read it in longer portions. The breaks I took with it were a big part of my problems with it.

The funniest book you read in 2012:
James Lear’s The Back Passage. It’s the dick tongue-in-cheek type of funny, with a lot of double entendres and such. Not purely a humorous book, but made me giggle the most. 

The saddest book you read in 2012:
Has to be Ian McEwan’s Atonement. Heart-breaking, but very beautiful. 

The shortest book you read in 2012:
Since I read the Sherlock Holmes –stories on the mobile phone, where they were edited very differently from normal books, I’m not sure of their length. So my answer will be James L. Grant’s collection of short stories, Digging Up Corpses, with 148 pages. 

The longest book you read in 2012:
World Without End by Ken Follett, with 1237 pages, and it was too damn SHORT!!! The kind of book you just sink straight into, and don’t necessarily want to come out. Besides, it is called World WITHOUT End. False advertising!

A book that you discovered in 2012 that you will definitely read again:
I think it would be easier to name something I won’t read again. But to name one, Kathleen Winter’s Annabel. I wanted to read it again as soon as I finished it.  

A book that you never want to read again:
If I don’t like a book, I stop reading it. So I suppose Niven’s abovementioned Kill your friends goes here.  

And finally, make a New Year’s Resolution:
I’m going to read some more classics in 2013, and read through many of the books I already own but which I haven’t gotten around to. I’ve made a list, and I’m gonna put it up here very soon.

Orlando

Title: Orlando
Author: Virginia Woolf
Published: 1928 originally, this edition 2004 by Vintage.
Genre: Biography
Pages: 215


One last book for 2012! Started with a classy note, ending in a similar way. Jolly good. *puffs on an imaginary pipe*

Born in the times of Queen Elizabeth -the one who lived 1533-1603, not the current one- Orlando is a young nobleman who, as the years and lovers pass, doesn't seem to age. He is a beautiful man, a dreamer and a poet, and thanks to his noble birth, when his heart is broken in England, he takes off to Turkey, to become an ambassador, only to return home years later, as a woman.

Turkey might be an interesting holiday destination...

Anyhoo. One could go on about how Virginia based Orlando on her lover, Vita Sackville-Baggins West, and all the gender issues which are really interesting to read about, frankly, from the point of view of someone in whose times these things, differences between men and women and their strict roles, were such a bloody big issue. And to see them through someone who has lived both sides of the coin. At times the writing felt long-winded and there were moments when I wanted to slap Orlando a little, but I enjoyed the whole ride. Woolf's tone was very humorous at points, and she can write rambling sentences like a boss.


Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon us, making us so unequally of clay and diamonds, of rainbow and granite, and stuffed them into a case, often of the most incongruous, for the poet has a butcher's face and the butcher a poet's; nature, who delights in muddle and mystery, so that even now (the first of November 1927) we know not why we go upstairs, or why we come down again, our most daily movements are like the passage of a ship on an unknown sea, and the sailors at the mast-head ask, pointing their glasses to the horizon; Is there land or is there none? to which, if we are prophets, we make answer "Yes"; if we are truthful we say "No"; nature, who has so so much to answer for besides the perhaps unwieldy length of this sentence, has further complicated her task and added to our confusion by provding not only a perfect rag-bag of odds and ends with us-a piece of a policeman's trousers lying cheek by jowl with Queen Alexandra's wedding veil-but has contrived that the whole assortment shall be lightly stitched together by a single thread.

And that's when I kinda fell in love with Virginia Woolf a little. I think I'm going to re-watch the movie made of Orlando now that the book is still in somewhat fresh memory, although that one sentence, and writing it out, has pretty much killed what was left of my brain after the christmas holidays and all the sweets, oh the bloody sweets! I remember liking it, the movie, the first time I saw it, and what's there not to like? Orlandy os played by Tilda Swinton! rowr.

So, bye bye 2012! Thank you for reading, and, umm, let's be careful out there!

Death of a Dustman

Title: Death of a Dustman
Author: M.C. Beaton
Published: 2002 by Grand Central Publishing, originally in 2001.
Genre: Murder mystery dipped in dark humour.
Pages: 226


Oh man, I really should write about these books when I finish them, one by one, not in a big lump like this.

Death of a Dustman is a Hamish Macbeth mystery. Like I said last time I read one of these, almost two years ago, Hamish Macbeth is one of my favourite TV-series. I recently watched it, from start to finish, and didn't want to part with Lochdubh and its people so soon. Even though Hamish, his ex-girlfriend and her father are the only people from the series that I recognised in the book.

Lochdubh's dustman is a right asshole called Fergus, who likes to boss people around, get drunk and beat up his wife. When he gets a proper title of Environment Officer and even an uniform from an over-eager councilwoman who wants to make Scotland green, he becomes worse. So no wonder that he soon ends up dead. The whole village hated his guts, so Hamish and his food-loving constable Clarry have a lot of people to interview.

I read this as a snack in the middle of The Hobbit and Orlando, in only a few days as this was such a light, enjoyable treat between the heavier reading. Funny, also, in a bit of a creepy way. Ended up laughing out loud in the lunch room at work, again. But that was by far the coolest way I've ever read of how to bring down a helicopter. I'mma gonna have to start reading more of this series. I'm not going to mind.


Hamish drove slowly around the network of one-track roads joining the outlying crofts, and then out on the main Lochdubh-Strathbane road. The rain had stopped and the clouds had rolled back from the mountains. The blazing heather on either side of the road glittered with raindrops. He rolled down the window and breathed in the scent of wild thyme, heather and pine. The magnificence of the glorious landscape reduced the nasty little doings of men to insignificance. 
And then, as he crested a hill, he saw the shambling figure of the tramp on the road ahead of him. He drove up and stopped just in front of Sean and jumped down.