“When I look at my room, I see a girl who loves books.”

 Just finished Looking For Alaska by John Green. Here's a review which is really a rant, so don't read it if you think it will keep you from enjoying the story. There aren't any spoilers.
Also, sorry about my awful laxity concerning tenses. I guess this book hasn't brought out the best in me.

So very, very disappointed by Looking for Alaska. I shouldn't really do it to myself: whenever I really like a book I should avoid the author's debut novel like the plaguey pox.
I really liked An Abundance of Katherines, the only other John Green book I've ever read. It was smart, funny, thoughtful. The characters were believeable and interesting. You wanted to know what would happen next!
Looking for Alaska was lacking on all those fronts. It wanted to be deep but ended up being as shallow and muddy as a puddle. (Forgive me the simile, my writing style may need some recovery time.) There were so many moments when I just wanted to punch the narrator and say 'look, buster, why are you going on and on about suffering? You're not suffering.' Which was, weirdly, true - even when bad things did happen to the characters there was never a sense of immediacy; the incidents just never seemed to impact as they were meant to. Even the (trying not to spill spoilers all over your possible future reading!) bad thing that 'changes everything' doesn't really seem to change the tone of the book at all. Any emotional scenes feel as if they were written in afterwards, by a different writer who was in a hurry to get the thing printed. None of the pranks felt funny - the general feeling behind the whole story was one of an ( appropriate, I guess. But still) adolescent hostility. Nothing was funny or heartfelt. Apart from a few moments between the main character, Miles (Pudge) and his roommate, Chips (the Colonel. I hate nicknames in books.) the whole thing didn't feel like a friendship story at all - there was a pervading and ugly sense of isolation throughout. Sorry if I seem to be groping my way through this novel by way of how it made me feel, but I found the book's agenda of wanting to make me think irritating, patronising and offensive by the end. And just let me get started on the characters!
Most of the characters only popped up now and then, randomly (like daisies!). Mostly forgettable, faceless cardboard cutouts - easily replacable by any other background character in recorded history. The three main characters, Miles, the Colonel and, of course, Alaska, are the only easily differentiated or even slightly memorable creations to feature in this novel. I liked the Colonel best - even though, come to think of it, he's so poorly created that I could hardly describe any defining features of his. I did like the fact that he seemed to actually have emotions, though.
I found Miles's philosophising pretentious and annoying and his self absorbtion just got to me so much! All mopey teenagers should be sent to third world countries where they can do some hard work and feel ashamed of their wimpy angst!
Alaska herself just didn't seem like a real person to me. I know, I know she was meant to be some sort of wild ethereal mystery person full of poetic emotion and moonlight and cigarettes. Honestly? She grossed me out. The kindest sensation Alsaksa aroused in me was a wry pity. And a heap of revulsion and annoyance. I know every female character in literature can't be Elizabeth Bennet, but why are so many just brainless selfish harpies? I don't get it.

I can see why, with its anti-authoritan themes and constant references to smoking, drinking and sex, this book is so attractive to adherents to the hipster culture. I appreciate the quotable bits that pop up all the time in white text on overdeveloped pictures on tumblr. But, on the whole, this novel was pandering and pretentious and I didn't get a thing out of it. Perhaps it has inspired some people to think deeply about life and death and purpose, but for me all that stuff was handled so badly I felt insulted.
Good day to you all.

“The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Wasn't that the point of the book? For women to realize, We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I'd thought.”

Bossypants by Tina Fey

I actually haven't seen many Tina Fey movies and none of the television she's involved in (unsurprising as this is Australia (resisting the impulse to capitalise those last three words as if I were talking about SPARTA)), so I was a bit lost for a great portion of this book. I've never watched any Saturday Night Live, so all of the references were pretty much lost on me altogether. That aside, it was a good read; Tina Fey's sense of humour and writing style were engaging, and, even if I was not entirely used to her rather brusque sense of humour, I enjoyed it. A good read.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

I saw the movie of The Help before I read the book - surprisingly I don't prefer one to the other! I liked both movie and book about equally, though the prettiness of the early 60s dresses nearly tips the movie over further into my favour. I found it a very human, believable story. It sucked me into the world of Jackson Mississipi, good and proper and got me hooked. One thing that annoyed me about it, a little, was the focus on how the antagonist looked all the time. I know, I know, it's a novel - descriptions are meant to serve a thematic purpose and everything was from the first person perspective of one of the three main characters anyway, but it just bothered me. One bit of narrative went on about how the antagonist dressed in kiddy clothes - another pointed out her big bottom. It annoyed me. Women picking on how other women look in this manner just doesn't seem like a mature way to deal with conflict. I might grouse a bit about Lady Gaga wearing a meat dress, but I don't consider her a personal enemy. Nor do I think myself particularly mature for finding fault in her wardrobe. Just a minor annoyance.

“When a woman says, ‘I have nothing to wear!’, what she really means is, ‘There’s nothing here for who I’m supposed to be today.”

Just wrote that enormous rant about Lewis Carroll.

But I've actually read a lot more than just that one book recently.

I can't actually remember most of the books I've read, which is quite sad.
Besides the Lewis Carroll biography I know I've read:

How to Be a Woman (really can't figure out which parts of that need capitalisation.
I am very tired.)

Caitlin Moran is a brilliant writer. Her writing style is entertaining (though the flashbacks in present tense were just plain annoying) and she chooses her topics cleverly, like a the editor of Dolly magazine or something. (I am really very tired!)

How to be a Woman is basically just a book about her personal experience of growing up as a member of the female gender and her opinions about it, expressed colloquially and intimately. OK, so she spends most of the book talking about female body parts and what we should call them, with a little bit of chat about motherhood and porn and other interelated things. Of course Moran is waaaaaay over on the left, (for the interested, I like to think of myself as apolitical, which is a lazy way of saying I think both sides of the political scope are morons) saying things like 'porn is not bad if it objectifies men and women equally' which is, in my personal and colloquial opinion, absolute rubbish, but hey, she says it pretty entertainingly.

I don't want to come down on people who drink or anything, even if they do it regularly, (alcoholism is not OK, though) but I just find it difficult to take seriously that new brand of comedy that some women seem to be espousing recently - the kind in which every paragraph contains a humourous reference to drugs and alcohol. Seriously? Can you have any sort of fun whilst sober? Do you have to be off your face in order to be funny? I don't drink much - mostly coz my crowd ain't a drinking crowd and I don't really like the taste anyway. So I don't get all this 'being a liberated woman means being allowed to abandon diginity in a slobby drunken mess on the floor all the time' stuff. I don't think that's a good thing for persons of any gender to be doing. And if you need alcohol in order to have a good time I think you might be the one with the inhibition problem. Jokes centred around drugs and alcohol, whether the comedy issues from men or from women, just aren't what I find funny. It's like listening to junior high schoolers make jokes about sex. It just seems immature and unfunny to me.
And that's what this whole book felt like, after I had finished it. When I was reading it I didn't agree with much but enjoyed myself rather. At the end I was left with a pervading sense of bitterness and emptiness that bothered me in a special way. Probably because of the abortion chapter, in which the author tries to approach abortion from a thoroughly pro-choice viewpoint and ends up just sounding wretched about the whole thing, despite, or perhaps because of her repeated disclaimers that her personal experience didn't haunt her at all. I couldn't take lightly the death of her baby, and when she tried to it just felt sick and more than a little tired and sad.

I'd love to read more of Moran's writing, because she is quite funny, and sometimes insightful, but I won't be recommending this book to anyone who feels any confusion over 'how to be a woman'.

I rant unreadably about Lewis Carroll.

Howdy howdy howdy.

Sooo... my recent readings:

Lewis Carroll: A Biography

I love Lewis Carroll. I mean, I really really really love Lewis Carroll. I know about six of his poems, have read all of his children's books - even Sylvie and Bruno - and I just love love love him as an author. One of my favourite memories of my childhood is snuggling up in bed on a winter's night with my hot water bottle (really an empty orange juice cask with hot water from the tap in it - ah the residual smell of hot orange juice!) and a battered old copy of Through the Looking Glass. A while ago - last year or the year before - I read Lynne Truss's book Tennyson's Gift: historical fiction about my favouritest group of writers ever, namely, the Victorians. It's all about a summer in which Lewis Carroll (or Charles Dodgson, to give him his real name) visited Tennyson on holidays like the sorta crazy fanboy he was. I thought I would love this book - the subject matter was awesome, Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots and Leaves already had me gunning for her, everything about it seemed to beg me to read it.
I hated Tennyson's Gift. I will never deliberately read a ficitonal book about real people with an eye to enjoyment again. Truss took my favourite authors and made them look like mean, unhappy idiots, all for comedic effect. If they were fictional people to begin with I could probably shrug it off - Jasper Fforde can do that, I don't mind. I rather enjoy it. But I just can't hack seeing real people I have real respect for being used and abused in a work of fiction. I can't.
 And she made Charles Dodgson out to be a closet paedophile. Humourously.

Dude. What the Heck?
This is not OK on so many levels. Charles Dodgson is one of the most enigmatic, paradoxical, fascinating people I have ever read about. Reading his prayers and pleas with God over some unnamed sin, I feel actually humbled. I can see how people read this stuff and say 'paedophilia!' The man had thousands of child friends! There was something wrong in his head!
Thing is, my diary reads like this a lot of the time. Particularly when I was younger: lots and lots of weepy grovelly 'God help me to change my horrible ways!' type stuff. But writing this stuff down helped me. I am a more sane person to this day because I wrote and prayed all the heavy feelings out of my head. And, to this day, all the hundreds of child friends who talked about Dodgson never ever made any sort of claim that he ever behaved around them in an inappropriate way. Victorians were way uptight, too, as you probably know. Some relative of Dodgson's posthumously crossed out a passage in his diary about how the real Alice (Alice Liddell) was grumpy when she was sick. That's the kind of stuff they censored! I don't think we need worry about worse things having been edited out, somehow.
Dodgson was a walking talking paradox. A stern and serious professor of mathematics who was all propriety and manners with adults and a clergyman who played games with children and wrote Alice in Wonderland for a group of little girls. An awkward, stammering man who invented a type of bicycle and wanted to bowlderise Bowlder's version of Shakespeare so little kids could read it. A conscientious man who held radical views about church and charity. The universally acclaimed best photographer of the 19th century.

My favourite story in this book is about a time he was invited to a kids' birthday party. He showed up, the servant let him into the drawing room and formally announced 'Charles Dodgson, ma'am,' to its occupants... Dodgson decided to get down on all fours and pretend to be a bear for the children. He got into the middle of the room, looked up... and found out that he was in the wrong house. So he gets up and gets out of the room without a word to any of the no doubt electrified Victorian tea pary! I CAN RELATE!

So... yeah. The book was good.

A man like Mr. Shaw has the deliberate intention of getting people to listen to what he has to say; and therefore he must be amusing.

Have left this far, far too long. Can't remember most of the books I've read since... when did I last post here? July? :-/ Wow. Sorry. I've done tons of reading since then, but time has placed too large a barrier in between me and most of the books, so I can only give you the few recent ones I remember well enough.

Common Sense 101: Lessons from G. K. Chesterton

I love G. K. Chesterton and his work - but, oddly, not as much as the author of this tome - a Dale Alquist. In theory this book was a really good idea - and it still is, if you can get past the irritating voice in which it's written. The author's reverence for Chesterton becomes overblown and annoying really really quickly - and I found his zealous adherence to Chesterton's (sometimes inaccurate/fallacious) beliefs and policies infuriating. The first half of the book is readable; the second half annoyed me to the point of writing furiously in the margins - which I have never done before in my life. Chesterton and Alquist both have a very poor understanding of the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism; I can deal with Chesterton's ignorance because firstly, he writes with wit and humour and secondly, he died in 1936. Alquist has no humour - his style comes across as somewhat whingy and his dogma is clumsy and has none of the elegance of Chesterton's.
I'm not going to dissect all the problems that I have with the assertions made in the second half of the book - if you want a sensible, clear-headed analysis of the Catholic/Protestant question read Nothing in My Hand I Bring by Ray Galea - which I meant to discuss in this blog but never did (oops!).
The first half of Common Sense sums up Chesterton's inimitable, original viewpoints on journalism, education, God, poetry, science, democracy and lots of other topics - the hero worship is a little overdone, but if you want a quick and concise introduction to Chesterton, read the first fourteen chapters.




Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith

 It might sound like an odd thing to say, but to me this book felt just like a cross between Diary of a Provincial Woman and Three Men in a Boat - though it was more like the former than the latter. Would love to see the musical!




The Happiest Refugee by Ahn Do

I have already expressed my love of autobiography here - particularly my love of autobiographies in which the author can look back with gratitude and perspective. This is definitely one of those books. Though some of the stories are heartbreaking, terrifying, even, the book is told with genuine affection and a lovely sense of hope breathing through it. I'm not familiar with Ahn Do's other work - in comedy and film, but this book has got me interested!


George Bernard Shaw by G. K. Chesterton

I really enjoyed reading Chesterton's opinions and analysis of Shaw (who was a good friend and rival of his) - I was quoting and highlighting away all through this slightly patronising but very loving interaction with the life and works of one of last century's most famous playwrights. I wasn't quite sure what to take away from the book in the end - but as a pleasant journey through Shaw and Chesterton's brilliant brains, it was quite sufficient.