Off to the middle of nowhere

I'm off on a two week house-sitting adventure, at a place with no internet, no digital TV, and plenty of cake. Hopefully i will manage to read a few books, and write a few stories. I have brought with me a selection of books, but I don't know which to read first! here is the list:

• 1984 by George Orwell (a book that i really should have read many years ago, but have never got further than the first few pages)
• The name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (I haven't read any Eco, except for a couple academic articles)
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (another of the many books that I have bought years ago but never read)
• The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum (apparently a lot darker than the film, and rather short)
• The Men who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson (found it in a second hand books shop a few days ago. I didn't know the film was based on a novel, and so I have seen the film, and liked it, so hopefully I will like the book)
• Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (one of the texts from my thesis last year that i only read bits of and really want to read more)
• The complete Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle (a lovely compuilation of fascmille copies of the original stories and The hound of the baskervilles as they appeared in the Strand Magazine. Hoping to read a story or two to boyfriend each night.)

I've also brought a rhyming dictionary, just in case I feel like being productive and writing some rhyming poetry.

Or i could always read one of the many books on native birds that are scattered about this house.

montyreads: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson.

This has been on my 'must read soon' list since i bought it back in 2009. What made me shove it to the top of the list was that boyfriend wanted us to watch the film, and I'm one of those annoying people that doesn't watch the film 'til I've read the book. (I also always stay in the cinema til the end of the credits). Fear and Loathing is one of those books that is held in high regard by the punk-readers, the ironic-shirted wannabe writers who go on week-long trips to the middle of nowhere to 'get inspired'. Not that that's a bad thing, but I am always a little bit skeptical of things that people really really love.

Fear and Loathing, however, deserves the love that it gets. Although it did not completely pull me in, it did entertain me. I love the kind of phrases Thompson uses:

'Here they were arguing with every piece of leverage they could command, for a room they'd already paid for and suddenly their whole act gets side-swiped by some crusty drifter who looks like something out of an upper-Michigan hobo jungle.'

The odd way the language flows and the left field humour connects it all together and makes you feel like you are on one big trip. Which i think is kind of the point.

i don't think i read it at the right time (or am possibly not the right kind of person) to really get the most out of this book. yes i liked it, but i don't love it. I'm looking forward to watching the movie though.

montyreads: The Vesuvius Club by Mark Gatiss

I finished reading this a while ago, and I'm really lazy so I haven't posted a review until now.
This was the perfect book for what I needed. Having just finished my honours year and had been stuck in academia for the last 5 years, it was time for some perfectly silly fluff. Gatiss' novel is an adventure full of murder, intrigue, debauchery and cross-dressing. Ridiculous and rather hilarious, it was great fun reading it. The Vesuvius Club leaves room for many more adventures for the main character Lucifer Box, who is rather like a deviant Sherlock Holmes with a talent for seducing pretty young things, whether they be male or female. I'm looking forward to reading future Lucifer Box adventures.

Only a short review this time, mainly because I finished reading it a while ago and can't remember too many of the details.

How lazy am I!

I've noticed I always read a Gibson on a Plane

William Gibson's Zero History is the third novel in the kind-of-trilogy Bigend Books. It recycles some characters, settings and ideas from Pattern Recognition and Spook Country and creates a new narrative within the 'Bigend Universe.'

This is the third Gibson novel I have read, after Pattern Recognition and Neuromancer, and I was expecting it to be as good as the other two. Unfortunately, I was not as blown away as I thought I was going to be. I was somewhat impressed, but there were quite a few things than annoyed me.

The most annoying was the ending. Not trying to give anything away, but Gibson seems to end his novels with a chapter or two tying all the loose ends up. I am not such a fan of this. I'm probably making a huge generalisation here, but I see it as a very American thing. Probably because of the 'Disneyfication' of movies, where the ending is always happy. This annoys me a lot. Zero History's ending is not as Disneyfied as Pattern Recognition, but it comes close. I think it's becuase of Gibson's habit of pairing characters off, something that I don't often feel convinced by.

Other than that, I did enjoy the book. I'm not entirely sure what genre to put it in, because I always expect a Gibson to be Science Fiction, which this isn't, but it still incorporates if not futuristic tech, then very present tech. Gibson's newer novels rely on present technology as a SF relies on speculative tech. I think I would call it an urban thriller, though the 'thriller' aspect of it is not so pronounced. Basically, it is an urban technological detectiveish thriller with bits of speculative fiction thrown in.

I love reading novels set in places where I have been, and when the characters in Zero History began talking about Melbourne, I was really hoping that at least part of the narrative would move to that wonderful coffee-scented city. I think Gibson's style of writing would suit Melbourne, his descriptions of cities are always poetic, fluid, and dead-on. I don't know if there are any scenes set in Melbourne in the novels of his I haven't read, but hopefully one day I will read a Gibsonised version of Melbourne.

Unfortunately I feel as if Gibson's writing will always be compared to Neuromancer, and in my opinion, Zero History is not as good. I had high hopes for Zero History, as I had been following Gibson's twitter during 2010 and had heard all the hype. I bought it at WorldCon that September, only a few days after it was released in Australia. But of course I didn't get around to reading it until late December. Overall, without comparing it to any other Gibson novels, it is a very clever and exciting novel. But I couldn't enjoy it enough to put Gibson's other novels I'd read out of my mind, and found myself constantly comparing it to Pattern Recognition, and couldn't help but hipsterly think 'I like his earlier work better.'

Next on my list is a book I bought at my favourite bookshop, Elizabeth's in Fremantle. It is Mark Gatiss' debut novel The Vesuvius Club. I don't know anything about it other than it is written by Mark Gatiss and it has a cool font on the cover.

No-one Gave Me Books For Christmas!

Usually I get at least one book for Christmas, and this year, even though I suggested one to a couple of people, I didn't get any! Not one!

But that's ok because I own so many books that I haven't read yet. Today I finished one of them, one which I have been reading on and off for the last month: Patrick Suskind's Perfume. I've been meaning to read it for a while, and someone was lovely enough to buy it for my birthday back in August.

Many people have told me how much they love this book, but honestly, I didn't love it. I didn't hate it either, but it didn't grab my attention like I was expecting it to. I think it would get better through multiple readings, but it's a fair way down on my list of things to re-read.

That said, I do think it is a wonderfully written book, and the way Suskind describes the different smells is amazing. The narrative switches from focusing on Grenouille to other characters, but this doesn't detract from the flow, but rather adds a different perspective and allows the reader to experience the story from multiple points of view, even though it is third person the whole way through.

Overall, a lovely book. The Boyfriend doesn't much appreciate the detailed *ahem* 'climax' of the novel, but I didn't find it that bad. I suppose after reading The Story of O nothing really shocks me.

Next on my list to read are Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, American Psycho and Zero History. I think I need something a little more modern, or edgy, or something. That's what I'm craving next. Something like Fight Club but not Fight Club because I read that not too long ago.

What Next?

Another of my bad book habits is buying so many books that I can't possibly read them all. This results in a bookshelf overflowing with books I haven't yet read. Now that I've run out of money, and have some time on my hands, I think I should start reading some of these unread books. So where should I start? Here is a small list of some of the books I have on my shelf that I should get to reading:

• Zero History William Gibson
• Perfume Patrick Suskind
• The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman Laurence Sterne
• The Name of the Rose Umberto Eco
• Perdido Street Station China Mieville
• Never Let Me Go Kazuo Ishiguro
• Lolita Vladimir Nabokov
• American Psycho Bret Easton Ellis
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Hunter S. Thompson
• The Day of the Triffids John Wyndham
• Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency Douglas Adams

And that's just my bedhead bookshelf. And I still have many pages of lists of books I still want to buy. I like books. Anyway, what book should I read next?

-Elimonster

I am No Longer a Student

And to celebrate, I finished reading Robert Shearman's collection of short stories about love, Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical. This, like his first, is subtly absurd, quietly heartbreaking and entirely brilliant.

I'm not yet sure which story is my favourite, though I did enjoy 'Luxembourg,' in which the entire country of Luxembourg disappears.

In a collection of stories about love, of course there is going to be some sex. I'm always a little wary of sex scenes in novels, sometimes they can be horrifying, like any of the sex scenes in Jodi Picoult's Nineteen Minutes (don't judge me, I had to read it for uni) or the scene in William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine which are so awkward and full of euphemisms. But the sex in Love Songs isn't horrifying. perhaps it's because Sherman actually uses the word 'penis' instead of euphemisms. Or perhaps it's because the sex flows so naturally within the narrative. However he does it, I'm impressed.

One of my favourite sections in the whole book that I loved comes from a story called 'Jolly Roger' which does have a rather disturbing sex scene in it, but it is disturbing for a whole different reason. The passage that I like:

'The first port of call was Vigo. Roger had never heard of Vigo before, but didn't hold that against it -- after all, there were lots of places he hadn't heard of, it didn't mean they were rubbish. However, Vigo was rubbish.'

Shearmans's writing is so calm and casual, and a pleasure to read. Another book to go on the 're-readable' shelf.

-Elimonster