Ivy's reading log

IvyTheTerrible

The adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain: I read this when I was about 9 or 10 and decided to revisit it again. I think when I read this the first time I didn't "get" a lot of the humour (I also distinctly remember finding it very difficult to understand what Jim was saying), I found it really funny and sharp on the rereading. Great novel, very entertaining and lots of interesting social commentary too.

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Them - Joyce Carol Oates: The story of a working class family living in Detroit between the end of the depression and the race riots of the late 60's. I thought this was really well told, Oates seemed to be able to get inside the skins of her protagonists.

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Fermat's Last Theorem: Simon Singh. The history of the theorem put forward by Fermat that has puzzled mathmaticians for centuries. I loved loved loved this book, Singh describes the maths involved in a very clear way, but also the personal stories of those people that became obsessed with the elusive proof. A great popular science read, it makes me want to go back to my maths books!

Murder on the Orient Express: Agatha Christie: This is a classic whodunnit, where Hercule Poirot tries to solve the murder of a rather nasty American on the famous train. Very fast moving and well told, I read this in one day.

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The Lies of Locke Lamora: Scott Lynch. A fantasy novel set in a sort of Renaissance Venice world. Locke Lamora is an orphan who becomes a very clever thief/con man. However he doesn't bet on the power of the Grey King. I'm not usually into Fantasy novels but this was quite fast moving and interesting story. There were just a couple of inconsistencies that bugged me a little bit (eg if I was a powerful mind controlling bondsmage, why woudl I hire myself out, would I not try for power myself?). All in all though, this was pretty enjoyable.

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Death on the Nile: Agatha Christie. Another great murder mystery from Agatha Christie. A rich girl is murdered while on a cruise on the Nile, and a large cast of characters are suspects. Lots of red herrings and twists. Great.

Small Gods: Terry Pratchett. A satire on religion and it's excesses. While this discworld installment was funny enough, I didn't enjoy it as much the other discworld novels with more familiar characters.

Lud in the Mist: Hope Mirlees. A fantasy novel written in the 20's about a town and it's inhabitants and how they are affected by Fairyland, which is just over the hills. I really enjoyed this, it was beautifully written and the imagery was great.

The Shell Seekers: Rosamund Pilcher. The story of Penelope and her children and how the children want her to sell her father's paintings. While I liked some of the descriptions of Penelope's life in wartime Britain, I found this novel full of clichés and cardboard cutout characters. The "good" characters are all bohemian, love their gardens and don't care about money or clothes, while the bad characters are evil social climbing moneygrabbers who send their horribly ugly children to private school. Also, at 600 pages, some of the interminable descriptions of meals and their preparation could have been left out. Good holiday read maybe but I wouldn't really recommend it.

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The Last Dickens : Matthew Pearl. I picked this off the bookshelf because I enjoyed The Dante Club, Pearl's first novel. This is the story of the final installments of Dicken's last book, Edwin Drood. Dickens died before he could finish Drood, but the protagonist of the novel, Dickens' American publisher, sets out to find if Dickens had actually finished the novel. While the research done by Pearl is very thorough, this book just felt silly to me. I wasn't convinced as to why lots of people were getting killed for something that didn't exist, and all because of opium deals! Just a bit too boring.

The Valley of the Squinting Windows : Brinsley McNamara. Banned when it was first published, this Irish novel is a great portrayal of hypocrisy in a small town. The characters are really well drawn, the postmistress that opens every letter in and out of her office, the priest that is only priestly with those of means, etc. The story turns around Nan Byrne, her son John who is training to be a priest, and the new schoolmistress Rebecca Kerr. Shocking (even now) and beautifully written.

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The Midwich Cuckoos: John Wyndham. I picked this up after I really enjoyed The Day of the Triffids from the same author. It's a sci fi story of a quiet English village which inexplicably falls asleep for 2 days. Later, all the women of the village become pregnant, and the resultant children are odd, to say the list. The writing really flows and the story is enjoyably unsettling. This was great.

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Notwithstanding : Louis de Bernieres. A lovely collection of stories about a Surrey village written in the quirky style particular to Louis deBernieres. Touching and very funny. Definitely would recommend.

4.05 from Paddington : Agatha Christie. The first Miss Marple mystery I have read, this is the story of a murder on a train, witnessed by an elderly lady on a passing train. There is no trace of a body, and no one believes the old lady. Then Miss Marple steps in to investigate. Very enjoyable mystery.

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Lords and Ladies: Terry Pratchett. Another great one from the Discworld series. This time, Pratchett focuses on myths about elves. Loved this, very funny.


You're an Animal, Viskovitz: Alessandro Boffa. A series of short stories, each told from the perspective of a different animal, called Viskovitz. I love how this was written, and found it hilarious. Great!

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The Year of the Flood: Margaret Atwood. This is a sequel to Oryx and Crake, set sometime in the future, after most humans have been killed by a man-made plague. It focuses on two women, Toby and Ren, who were members of a religious group called God's Gardeners, who are environmentalists, mourn the loss of exti...nct animals (which is most species) and have saints like Dian Fossey. I found this moving and also rather disturbing, in that aspects of this dystopian future are not unimaginable in real life. Recommended, if you want a thoughtful read.


The Mysterious Affair at Styles: Agatha Christie. The first Hercule Poirot mystery. While Christie's writing style is not as honed as in later novels, this is still a very enjoyable whodunnit. (Although I couldn't figure out why noone suspected the narrator).

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The Help: Kathryn Stockett. The story of two black American maids and a white woman who become unlikely friends in Mississippi of the early 1960s. This was beautifully written, thoughtful and moving without being sentimental. Highly recommended.

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The Stand: Stephen King. This is a re-read for me. It's the story of a superflu developed by the US army that is accidentaly released and kills 99.9% of the population. The resulting people have to try to rebuild a society but end up in a battle of "good versus evil", evil being the "Dark Man" who is often mentioned in King's novels. This was LONG (1100 pages in the uncut edition) but it was quite easy (if gruesome in parts) to read. I found the first part of the book describing the collapse of society much more frightening the the Dark Man character, if only because it seemed more real! Still, it's a good horror story and will leave you nervous.

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Maps for Lost Lovers: Nadeem Aslam. This is a novel about a Pakistani family living in England and the year after one of the family members and his lover go missing, presumably murdered in an honour killing. I thought this would be a an interesting novel but I didn't enjoy it at all, for two main reason. Firstly, this is an unrelentingly negative portrait of Muslims, almost tending torwards racism. All the women are manipulative cruel shrews, and all the men are weak and often abusers, unless of course they are westernised, when they are A-ok. Secondly, the style of writing was really irritating, there were ridiculous metaphors on every single page (I'm not exagerating). Did you know that the sweat between two lovers is like the weak glue holding orange segments together? Or that birch leaves fallen on the ground are like a child's crisps spilled on the ground? This really took away from the story. Not recommended.

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The Murder of Roger Akroyd: Agatha Christie. Another classic Hercule Poirot mystery, very entertaining and I really didn't imagine who the murderer was until all was revealed.

Gomorrah: Italy's other mafia: Roberto Saviano. A bit of non-fiction for a change, this is a journalistic account of the Comorra, the Naples mafia. It is really frightening to realise how many aspects of Italian, but also European, life are controlled by this mafia group: clothing, waste disposal, construction... etc. This is an exposé but it also a poignant protest. There is no escape from the Comorra if you chose not to abandon Naples. I liked the unusual style Saviano used and found this extremely interesting. (FYI, Saviano is in permanent hiding after threats to his life since this book was published).

A Canticle for Liebowitz: Walter M Miller. The story of a community of monks after an apocalyptic event ("The Flame Deluge") who's patron saint is St Leibowitz, who developed the atomic bomb but later was remorseful and set up a community of monks. This is a beautifully written novel, and while the blurb on th...e cover said it was a novel of hope, to me it seemed like a message that we humans are doomed to endlessly repeat the same mistakes. While I would highly recommend this, I'm going to give the end-of-the-world novels a miss for a while...

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And then there were none: Agatha Christie. A disparate group of twelve people are invited to an island for a weeks holiday. One by one, they are killed off. The murderer can only be one of the guests...but who is it? One of the more unusual Christie mysteries, I enjoyed the suspense in this one and had no idea who the murderer was right til the end.


Men at Arms: Terry Pratchett. A series of murders are committed with a strange and powerful weapon, and it's up to Sam Vimes and the Ankh-Morpork Night Watch to solve the murders. This discworld installment is by far the funniest I have read so far, I had many laugh out loud moments reading this. Highly recommended.

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The Yiddish Policemen's Union: Michael Chabon. This is a sort of hardboiled detective story in the tradition of Raymond Chandler etc. The twist is that it is set in the fictional Sitka Jewish settlement in Alaska (imagine if the state of Israel was never formed and that the surviving jews are given a settlement in Alaska) which is due to revert to the US in a few months. A junkie is murdered in the same fleabag hotel in which lives the detective Landsman, who is an alcoholic and who's career is going downhill. Landsman starts investigating the murder and uncovers something much bigger. I loved this, very funny in places but also dealt with difficult topics well too. I found it a little bit difficult to get used to all the Yiddish words being used but otherwise I would recommend this as a good read.

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My Man Jeeves: PD Wodehouse. A series of short stories, the majority of which are about Bertie Wooster and his inimitable butler, Jeeves. Most stories were very funny, as Jeeves comes up with solutions to Bertie's problems. Recommended for a good giggle.

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Picnic at Hanging Rock: Joan Lindsay. The year is 1900 and a group of girls from a prestigious school go for a picnic with some of their teachers at Hanging Rock in the Australian bush. Three of the girls and one of their teachers go missing in mysterious circumstances. The remainder of the novel deals with the aftermath of their disappearance. I love the atmosphere that the author generates, and I felt that her description of the varied effects of the disappearances on different characters was very believable. Great book.

Edit: This is the 50th book I've read this year, I didn't realise I was reading so much!

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Her Fearful Symmetry: Audrey Niffenegger. Elspeth lives in a flat overlooking Highgate cemetary in London, where her partner Robert volunteers. Elspeths dies and leaves her flat and savings to the American twin daughters of her sister, on condition that they live in the flat for a year, and that their parents never enter the flat. The first third of this novel was promising, as it dealt with Robert's grief and also the relationship between twins. The descriptions of Highgate cemetary were also interesting. However, after that, it goes rapidly downhill. The ghost-story aspect of the novel gets more and more ridiculous and the choices the characters make become more unbelieveable and frankly quite repugnant. Also I could not figure out the point of the character Martin, and his OCD. After really loving The Time Traveller's Wife, this second novel left me cold and was very disappointing.

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Soul Music: Terry Pratchett. Another installment of the Discworld series, this one deals with what happens when rock music crosses over from another universe and how it makes everyone that comes in contact with it a bit crazy. It's reasonably funny, it also resolves some issues about Death, Mort and Susan.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: Jean-Dominique Bauby. At 137 pages, this seems like a short book, until you realise that Bauby, former editor in chief of Elle, dictated this from his hospital bed using blinks as code after he was left in a "locked-in" state following a stroke. It's a beautiful story, dealing with Bauby's life as an invalid, and his life before. While very sad, it also has moments of dry humour, and no self pity at all. I would recommend this amazing, inspiring book to everyone. Great.

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Murder on the Links: Agatha Christie. The second Hercule Poirot mystery, where the body of a successful business man is found murdered on a golf course. Before Poirot can solve this mystery, another body, seemingly murdered in the same way, is discovered. Typically complicated whodunnit from Agatha Christie, and while not as polished as the later Poirot mysteries I have read, still very entertaining.

The Egg and I: Betty MacDonald. The first in a series of autobiographical stories about a young woman in the first half of the 20th century, who goes to live with her husband on an isolated chicken ranch. While this experience was extremely difficult (no electricity, no running water, hundreds of demanding chickens, crazy neighbours), MacDonald used her sense of humour to get through it. There were many moments where I actually laughed out loud reading this. A great story of life on a ranch, very funny and highly recommended.

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Skippy Dies: Paul Murray. Skippy/Daniel is a 14 year old boy who is a boarder at the exclusive boys school, Seabrook. The novel opens with him dying on the floor of a doughnut house, and the remainder of the book deals with the lead up to his death, and it's aftermath. This is a funny, touching book, and I thought Murray protrayed his characters very well. It is fairly long (660 pages or so) and could have been cut a bit (the descriptions of M theory and World War One didn't really need to be so detailed) but otherwise a great read. Recommended.

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The House of Echoes: Barbara Erskine. Joss inherits an old English mansion from her biological mother and thinks moving there with her husband and baby son will solve her economic problems. Soon, however, ghostly happenings start to scare her. This ghost story was scary enough in parts but it was hard to get into the atmosphere with all the whining all the characters were doing. Also some of the choices the characters made were very illogical...how many times do you find "massive" bruises on your baby before you move out of a house? And the ending really smacked of Deus Ex Machina. Grand to while away a few hours but nothing special.

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The Lacuna - Barbara Kingsolver. Harrison Shepherd has an American father and Mexican mother, who are separated, and he spends his early years between Mexico and a boarding school in Washington. He ends up working as a cook/secretary for Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, during the thirties when they sheltered Trotsky. When he becomes famous in later years, his past comes back to haunt him. This is a wonderful novel, the descriptions of Mexico are beautiful, and it is extremely well written. Recommended.

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Interesting times: Terry Pratchett. Rincewind gets magically summoned from his (very safe) desert island to the Hung empire where he will be used as the scapegoat for a revolution that has to fail, to allow Lord Hung to become emperor. Of course things don't pan out like that. Satire on myths about the Chinese emperors. Funny enough, though Rincewind is not my favourite Discworld character.

The Big Four: Agatha Christie. A man dies in front of Hercule Poirot, and it seems he is the victim of a mysterious and powerful group dubbed the "big four" who wish to change the world order. Lots of deaths and unbelieveable coincidences, this is a bit too much into spy novel territory for me. I prefer Christie's more "traditional" murder mysteries.

Down Under: Bill Bryson. A chronicle of Bryson's travels around Australia, this is a really interesting and funny travel log. Bryson manages to make ordinary encounters hilarious, underlines the deadliness of Australia, describes a fascinating country and doesn't shirk more serious issues (the position of Aborigines in Australia, environmental issues etc). I loved this and it has increased my desire to travel to Australia.

Player One: Douglas Coupland. Five strangers end up trapped in an Airport bar during a global catastrophe. A really fascinating novel, that deals with life, death, all the big philosophical questions. Great, highly recommended.

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Swan Song: Robert McCammon. This is a very long novel which describes the start of a nuclear war that tears the world apart, and it's aftermath. The survivors (such as the eponymous Swan, who has a way with plants, Josh the wrestler, Sister the bag-lady, Roland the unpleasant teenager, and Colonel Macklin, the ex-army officer and mercenary) struggle to survive. Parallels between this book and Stephen King's The Stand are obvious, given the battle between good and evil. At the beginning of the novel, I was irritated that McCammon even had a character very very similar to the "Dark Man" of The Stand. However, dare I say it, I felt this novel was written better than the Stand, and in particular the denouement was much better handled. Frightening and gruesome in places, this novel is ultimately a story of hope. Recommended.

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The Mystery of the Blue Train: Agatha Christie. Mr Van Aldin's rich daughter is murdered on the Blue train to the Riviera. Was she murdered by a robber? Or was it her soon to be ex husband? Or the Comte de la Roche? Only Hercule Poirot can find out! Enjoyable mystery.

The Oh My God Delusion: Ross O'Carroll Kelly/Paul Howard. The recession has well and truly hit Ireland, when even Ross O'Carroll Kelly is being affected by it. His ex wife Sorcha is about to lose her shop, skangers have moved in next door, his mother is forced to cook "famine food" on RTE. This is a very funny installment in the series. Howard seems to have gotten the recession spot on. Very funny, touching in parts, I would recommend this.

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Diagnosis: Dispatches from the Frontlines of Medical Mysteries: Lisa Sanders. Sanders, a practising doctor, advisor for the programme "House" and writer of a NY Times column, writes about how doctors make their diagnoses, from the patient's story, the physical exam to high-tech tests. She explains the advantages and limitations of each aspect of making a diagnosis, and where the doctors can go wrong. I found this fascinating and also somewhat scary, in that experience seems to be one of the most important factors in making a diagnosis, and also the fact that the physical exam (at least in American medicine) is disappearing from hospitals. Sanders never gets too bogged down in medical terms, I found this easy to follow, and she showed a lot of humanity in the stories of patients. Recommended if you are interested in medicine.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: Oliver Sacks. Sacks is a neurologist who was made famous by the "Awakenings" of Parkinson's disease patients. In this book, he describes different types of neurological problems that can arise from "losses" (of memory, physcial function etc), excesses (Tourette's syndrome), transportations (visions etc) and mental retardation, through a serious of patient histories. While he shows sensitivity in dealing with these histories (especially with the stories of mentally handicapped people), and does spur some interesting thought on the idea of "self" and "soul" (eg some of the patients were happier with their "problem" than they were before), I got a little bogged down in the technical details and terms he used. It was an interesting read but perhaps I would have enjoyed it more had I more experience in the area.

Maskerade: Terry Pratchett. Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax need a third witch. Agnes Nitt (or Perdita as she prefers to be called) seems the perfect candidate, but she prefers to go to the city to be an opera singer. A pastiche of musicals, opera and the phantom of the opera, this is another funny installment of the Discworld series.

Feet of Clay: Terry Pratchett. Some mysterious murders have been happening in Ahnk-Morpork and it's up to the Night Watch to solve them. The Patrician is also being poisoned, and someone is trying to make Nobby the king. Angua is having an identity crisis. While I enjoyed this, it was at times a bit convoluted.

Death in the Clouds: Agatha Christie. Poirot takes a flight between Paris and London, and one of the passengers is murdered without anyone noticing. All we know is that she was killed using a poison dart. A good Poirot mystery.

Peril at End House: Agatha Christie. A young lady escapes death several times in one week, and enlists Poirot to find out who is trying to kill her. But not everything is as it seems. Another good mystery with plenty of red herrings.

Five Little Pigs: Agatha Christie. A young woman contacts Poirot, she wants him to prove that her mother was innocent of her father's murder 16 years ago. Only five people ("pigs") are possible suspects. Can Poirot solve such an old mystery? Of course!

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Mary and The Wrongs of Woman: Mary Wollstonecraft. Wollestonecraft (mother of Mary Shelley) was a very early feminist, and she used these two novellas to illustrate her ideas on injustice to women in marriage and property laws. "Mary" tells the story of a young woman who is forced into a loveless arranged marriage, which she escapes through an intense female friendship, and later with Henry, an ill philosopher. The story itself is not so important as the main character's reflection on sensibility (the mind) and sentimentalism (the feelings) and the oppression of women of all classes. "The Wrongs of Woman" (which is unfinished) describes the story of Maria, who is wrongly imprisoned in a mental asylum so her brutish husband can avail of her inheritence. This is a very strong condemnation of the property and marriage laws at the time, and there are also commentaries on prostitution and women's right to work and be independent. At first I found this hard to get into because of the language used but the introduction (in the Oxford World Classics edition) and explanatory notes were excellent. Very interesting (especially considering that a lot of the story is autobiographical), and made me realise I'm lucky to be a woman now and not 200 years ago.

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Room: Emma Donoghue. Jack is a five year old boy who has lived in Room with his mother since he was born. His mother was abducted and locked away in a single room 8 years ago. This novel, told from Jack's point of view, describes their life in "Room". I thought Donoghue got Jack's voice spot on. While this is sometimes difficult to read, I found it very well told and moving, particularly the second half. Recommended.