The Bridge of San Luis Rey is about a monk who, upon witnessing the collapse of a bridge in Peru, sets about investigating the lives of the people who died. The goal of such an investigation is to determine whether it was chance or divine intervention (i.e. the hand of God). I could have told him straight away and saved him the time but that’s besides the point I would suspect.
I tried to like this book. I tried to get past the first 30 pages. I just couldn’t do it. It bored me to tears. I just didn’t care. It was too confusing – there were too many names that were too similar. After reading for 20 pages about a mother and a daughter I still couldn’t figure out which was the mother and which was the daughter.
After 30 pages I looked at my bookshelf and saw what I still had unread and decided that life is too short.
A Million Little Pieces is a memoir by James Frey recounting his time in rehab for drug addiction. It’s a fascinating book and it’s also one of the most emotionally gripping books I’ve read in a long time.
Frey wakes up on an aeroplane with a broken nose, teeth missing and a hole through his cheek. He has no idea how he got there. He is met at the airport by his parents and soon checks into rehab.
His battle to get sober is intense and graphically accounted for. And I mean really really graphic. I’ve sat through my fair share of violent films and TV shows but even this book made me go ‘yuck’ at points.
Frey is constantly fighting. Fighting against the law, the 12 Step program that his clinic want him to go through – even other patients. What he fights the most though, is against himself. The battle for control is one that Frey places wholly with himself. His over-active sense of cynicism and mistrust of the system and of other people gradually drops, especially when he falls in love with a fellow addict at the clinic (but men and women aren’t allowed to fraternise – it’s never easy, is it?). Still, he is never really happy with the 12 Step program, especially seeing as he doesn’t believe in God. The picture from inside the clinic can be bleak at times – especially the 15% success rate. In the book when people leave the clinic there is always some hope that they can make it on the outside, but you do get the sense that deep down they know that it’s just another case of rolling the dice to see how long they’ll survive.
Most people will recognise the name of this book for the Oprah controversy and not for the book itself. Firstly, a primer if you’re not familiar. At least some of this book is made up or embellished. Maybe a lot of this book is made up or embellished. The Smoking Gun did an investigation of some of the criminal claims Frey makes and found his truthfulness to be somewhat lacking. I would strongly suggest that you don’t read that link until you’ve finished the book. That’s what I did and I’m glad.
I’ve come to the conclusion that even if all of it was made up it would still be a good book. Coming into it I knew that at least some of it was untrue (from my memory of what happened at the time) but it didn’t bother me. All the emotion still seems real. And the romantic thread will tear your heart out, I guarantee.
Go into this book without second-guessing what is and isn’t true and you’ll enjoy it.
Stephen Colbert (the last ‘t’ is silent) is a opinion-based comedy character created by Stephen Colbert (the last ‘t’ is not silent). He has his own show, The Colbert Report (the last two t’s are silent). He started on The Daily Show but soon gained his own show and I actually enjoy it more than The Daily Show now.
Colbert is modelled on a conservatively-opinionated host who goes into every story with pre-conceived opinions that never change. He isn’t too impressed by new ideas his guests may come up with, either. It should come as no surprise that Colbert often refers to Fox News host Bill O’Reilly as “papa-bear”. The comical aspects of O’Reilly’s performances are often highlighted in Colbert’s show. Here is the interview that Colbert (in character) did on O’Reilly’s own show. You can hear the crew laughing in the background.
So then, we come to this book. It is basically Colbert’s thoughts on a range of topics from animals to religion to sex to science and everything in between (but not sex with animals…I don’t think so, anyway). This book is great for a 5 minute read every now and then because the stream of thoughts are cut up into nice bit-sized pieces (probably catering to the younger generation that watch his show on Comedy Central). There are humorous footnotes everywhere and stuff in the margins also. This works in a similar way to his “The Word” segment, shown below talking about the Beijing Olympics.
What will ultimately hamstring Colbert in his audience appeal is that he requires the viewer to know who a lot of the political, social and media heavyweights in America are. For an Aussie like me, this can be difficult at times. For example, not many people would know that Nancy Pelosi, featured in the above clip, is the Democratic speaker of the US Congress (and third in line to the Presidency). Not knowing that means you wouldn’t get that aspect of the gay yak joke. Having said that though, Colbert does act as an educator and if you stick it out (or just whip out Wikipedia) you should get most of the jokes eventually.
For the above reason, I would be very hesitant to recommend this book to someone who doesn’t enjoy Colbert’s politically and socially-charged show because this book is merely an extension in a paper form. Not that that’s a bad thing but if you don’t like the show you’re not going to like the book.
(You can watch The Colbert Report online legally and for free)
I’ve always had a romanticised view of cops. NYC cops in particular. Maybe it’s the uniform, I dunno. I certainly enjoyed (the vanilla version of) Law & Order for a good stretch when I had the time to watch it.
Blue Blood is an autobiography of New York City cop Edward Conlon. He charts his rise from rookie to Gold Shield Detective. What makes this book special is Conlon himself. A graduate of Harvard (which he often wrote illegibly on forms so people wouldn’t make a deal of it), Conlon displays an amazing eloquence in his writing as well as a fastidious attention to detail. Not only does he take us through his career but also pieces together what he can of his father’s career as an FBI agent, as well as several relatives who were also cops.
We see that just like many careers, bureaucracy and politics often has far more bearing on career progression than performance and merit. Conlon spends most of the book trying to get out of a unit that, although once enjoyable, has turned sour. He also disperses a very thorough history of the NYPD and of the city itself. What I found disappointing was that he did not include more than a passing analysis of the dramatic decline in crime (75% fall in violent crime over 12 years) in New York and offer opinions as to why he thought it came about.
He also confirms (second hand) that the photocopier lie detector was actually successfully used which is one of my favourite clips from The Wire.
Blue Blood, at upwards of 550 pages, can be a little heavy to go through, particularly if (like me) you’re not very familiar with New York. The meticulous recording of precinct numbers, street names and the like can get tedious after a while, as can the constant lists of names of people he worked with (especially when they are not involved directly in the story and serve more as a shout out to people he knows). Still, the amount of detail surrounding warrants, drug busts and informants is where the book shines and if that piques your interest then you’ll probably enjoy this book as much as I did.
This book won the Man Booker Prize in 2003. I remember it as being supposedly a ‘big deal’ so I was eager to see what it takes to win a Booker. I was pleased to find a well-structured book with an interesting premise and one or two sympathetic characters.
The main character is Vernon Little who lives with his mum in a small Texan town where school shooting on a Columbine-scale has just occurred. The shooter, Vernon’s best friend, was the shooter and committed suicide before he could get caught. Vernon is the scapegoat for the whole affair in the eyes of the local (and incompetent) police. The media soon storm the town and we see how quickly things can get out of hand and Vernon is stuck between telling the painful truth and going to jail for something he didn’t do. There are twists and turns all the way, lots of double-crosses and smart moves by Pierre that will keep you interested.
Is this one of the best teenage books ever, or it simply a great book with a teenager as the central character? This book isn’t the kind of uppity book written in hard to grasp language that you might associate with a literary award-winning book. If teachers want to get kids interested in reading then this is the kind of book they should be reading. It is much deeper than an average teenage novel but teenagers will find elements incredibly relatable.
However, if you’re not at school don’t let the above put you off – it’s simply a great book with a teenager at the centre. He may be 15 but he is mature and wise (maybe debatable) beyond his years. There’s something for everyone (except maybe if you’re a prude – the language and themes can be a little confronting).
I now bring you part two of the series of books-my-sister-has-spoilt-in-part-or-in-whole (the first of which being One The Beach).
I haven’t seen the movie so I only had a vague jist about what the book was about. Allow me to give you more of a jist. The book is set in a mental hospital, run by the iron-fisted passive-aggressive Nurse Ratchet. We are narrated throughout the book by Chief Bromden, a native American Indian who pretends to be mute. He proves to be a very endearing character (to me at least) and the fact that none of the staff know he can actually hear works as a plot device because he is able to listen in to the staff member’s conversations. However, this struck me as more of a convenience as opposed to a believable situation. I would have thought that sooner or later a staff member would realise The Chief’s reaction to some kind of noise. Anyway, the facility is more or less in a state of equilibrium with Nurse Ratchet having more or less total control over the patients.
Until…
…enter McMurphy, the brash felon who, after deciding that a mental institution may be less work than chain gangs, decides to get admitted. McMurphy is not your typical patient and, as Nurse Ratchet soon discovers, is far from content to be downtrodden and accept conditions as they are. None of this is really new, though. The premise of the outsider coming in to an established environment and stirring things up is old as time. What is fascinating is the cat and mouse game that Nurse Ratchet and McMurphy play throughout the book. All the time you wonder who is going to win in the end.
I enjoyed this book a lot, although it took a dive when I ‘accidentally’ found out the ending.
This book really does disappoint. Maybe it’s the fact that it’s a good 50 years old now but seeing as I actually liked On the Beach and Animal Farm which are similar in age I’m starting to think that maybe age is not the barrier here.
But I’m probably too far ahead of myself already.
The Bridge over the River Kwai is about the building of…well…a bridge over the River Kwai during the Second World War by British prisoners-of-war. A second thread in the book covers a British mission to destroy the very same bridge that their compatriots are building. Sounds promising, right? Well I thought so, but it doesn’t deliver – not by a long shot.
The first problem is the, for want of a better word, ‘Britishness’ of it (which is slightly strange considering it was written by a Frenchie) the strong, silent stiff upper lip kind of Britishness engulfs every character. The cold and calculating figures that fill the book mean that its hard to develop sympathy for anyone (maybe with an exception in Clipton, the doctor, but his part is minimal towards the latter stages of the book and I never really got a sense as to what he was feeling).
The 1967 edition I read promised me “Pierre Boulle’s best-seller about the horrors of life in a Japanese P.O.W. camp”. The horrors (of which I’m sure there were plenty in the real P.O.W. camps) are glossed over throughout the book. After some initial hardship the construction of the bridge proceeds smoothly without Boulle even batting an eyelid. This requires a suspension of disbelief that I just couldn’t muster.
Most of the second half of the book revolves around the planning of the attack on the bridge. Note that I say the planning because that’s pretty much what it is – planning. The tediousness of the planning of the attack will most probably put you to sleep. Most readers will be satisfied when the author describes how much of a perfection artist a certain character but Boulle decides to really ram it home by making the book tedious to read by taking us step by step through every single planning decision. The result of this is that the last 10 or 15 pages contain more action than the preceding 175. In these final 15 pages Boulle doesn’t even seize on the opportunity to deliver what he has built up over the whole book, instead deciding to tell the pivotal moment in the book after the fact.
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