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.
Animal Farm (which, after 1984, is probably Orwell’s best know work) is an allegory critical of communism.
Ok, I lie.
Just a little?
Communism in its simplest form is both the classless and stateless ownership of the means of production. At the time Orwell was writing Animal Farm (1943-1944) Russia under Stalin was arguably far from what someone like Marx had envisioned. The fundamental problem with a classless system that I see is that someone has to make decisions about what needs to be done. That, and greed. Greed always creeps in. So if it’s not about communism then what is it critical of? Orwell was strongly critical of Stalinism led by (you guessed it) Stalin, the leader of Russia at the time. Orwell believed that Stalinism was a corruption of the socialist ideals that Marx originally had in mind. It’s not hard to imagine the kind of political embarrassment for the West when it was first published in 1945. At the time Russia was an ally of the West, having just defeated the Germans in Berlin a few months before.
Animal Farm is set on a farm with your typical range of animals and a farmer, the dreaded (by the animals) Mr Jones. One night one of the aging animals incites the animals to take action against their human suppressors. An uprising occurs not too soon after his death and soon the animals have the farm to themselves and free to live in the society they have always dreamed of.
At first, everything goes swimmingly. The power vacuum does start to prove to be too great however, and as I alluded to earlier, when you have a group of people trying to achieve something, someone always ends up leading. We see this familiar trend emerge soon enough and the ‘slippery slope‘ thoughts will start creeping in to most readers minds.
What is charming about this book as a criticism is the narrator is completely objective and doesn’t pass judgement about any of the occurrences on the farm. It would be way too easy to slant this way towards Orwell’s argument but he lets the reader take away from it only as much as they want to. If you had no idea that communism/Stalinism even existed then you may just see the unfolding events as sad or scary. I would like to think though that most people would have a vague idea about the circumstances surrounding the book (as if the references to “Comrade” wouldn’t be enough).
If you read this book make sure you have a look at Wikipedia to see the correlation between characters in the book and figures of the era. See how many you can fit together before you look. My opinion of the book sky-rocketed when I found out who all the characters were meant to represent (I had many “ohhhhhhhhhh………I get it now” moments).
“That’s so depressing,” my sister remarked when she saw I was reading this. Gee thanks, I thought. On the Beach is set in Melbourne in the 60s amongst a post-World War III environment of impending nuclear doom. Due to no fault of Australia, cobalt-based bombs have wiped out everywhere north of Australia and the cloud of destruction is slowly but surely drifting south.
We follow the lives of five people: the captain of an American nuclear submarine, an Australian navy officer posted to the submarine, his wife, their alcoholic friend and a CSIRO scientific officer also posted on the submarine. The seagoing members in the book are sent on journeys to work out how far the radiation is spreading and to look for signs of life up north.
What surprised me was the calm resignation that pretty much all the characters exhibit, despite knowing that all life is sure to end in just a few months time. They go on with planning for the future years down the track (planting gardens, ploughing fields, etc.) which at first I thought was crazy but then it dawned on me: even if you knew when you were going to die, keeping busy is the only thing that would prevent you from curling up in the corner in the foetal position.
The other linked concept here is the difference between knowing when you’re going to die and it being a surprise. All the characters have an approximate date for Melbourne’s demise and its interesting to see the way the community as a whole handles the situation.
So overall, I didn’t find it depressing (a little bit sad, yes). The dignity with which the characters face their inevitable doom was inspiring. A good classic Australian (I think Shute was British but we’ll claim it anyway) book.
So I’ve finally gotten myself a copy of Syrup, Max Barry’s first book. Whilst Company was about office politics and Jennifer Government was about capitalism, Syrup is about the image-driven world of marketing. We follow Scat and 6 (yes, Barry loves screwing with the conventions of peoples names, just like in Jennifer Government) as they try and climb the corporate ladder at Coca-Cola.
Not surprisingly, the path to success is far from easy, nor guaranteed. There’s double-crossing and backstabbing galore, with twists and turns all the way. The pace is sharp and there’s heaps of laughs to be had. If you weren’t already cynical about marketing then you’re definitely going to be after reading this (and that’s probably not a bad thing I would say).
The screenplay for Syrup has just been finished. Make sure you read this before they start filming so you can say you were an original fan (!)
Another great Barry book. Given Company was only just released I’m guessing we’ll have to wait another few years for his next book. I can’t wait.
Firstly, this is not a self-help book. I felt burning eyes of judgement when I pulled it out on the train but of course if I stood up and shouted the truth I’d look more crazy. This book is about the science behind happiness and how the brain works. It contains some very interesting revelations. If you won the lottery how happy do you think you would be in one year? More happy than someone who has a car accident and becomes paraplegic? Of course you would think you would be but Gilbert shows otherwise. We discover that lottery winners are equally as happy as paraplegics one year after the major change in their life.
There’s two reasons for this. Firstly, we are really bad at predicting future outcomes of events. We over-emphasise the duration and intensity of our abnormal feelings about these outcomes. We think a lottery winner would be a lot happier than they actually are and we think that these feelings would last a lot longer than they actually do. Secondly, we synthesise happiness in the absence of ‘real’ happiness. People whose situation from the outside may seem hopeless will often our brains soften the impact of bad events.
He also discusses how the brain ‘cheats’ in its memories by filtering out a lot of the boring stuff and highlights key points in events. For example, our opinion of a movie is heavily skewed towards the ending just because our brain picks key parts (it can’t store every event in our lives) out and ‘fills in’ the rest when required. This filling in is not always reliable though so although you may really enjoy a movie at the time but aren’t impressed by the ending, recalling the movie in a few months time will probably bring the bad ending to forefront so your memory later is that you didn’t really like it.
Maybe if I hadn’t already read The Paradox of Choice before reading this I would have gotten more out of it. There is a bit of overlap between Gilbert and Schwartz’s work. I did end up struggling through this one from about three-quarters of the way in until the end. The themes do get slightly repetitive although there is a liberal dab of humour thrown in there to keep you interested.
I wouldn’t recommend you read both Paradox and Stumbling and I would probably recommend Schwartz’s work over this one.
Gilbert’s appearance at TED is below and he covers a couple of the studies he discusses in the book.
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