The Blindfold by Suri Hustvedt

The first time I read this book I really didn't like it, then I reread it and began to be enchanted. On one level it is the story of the coming of age of Iris Vegan, an intellectually intelligent but emotionally naive midwest girl come to New York to university. Like a little girl in a fairytale she meets a cast of characters on the streets and in the buildings of the urban jungle, the creepy obsessive Mr Morning, the too too cool Stephen and his artistic friends, Iris' professor lover and Iris' own transformation into a she/he wandering the seedier pits of the urban landscape and New York itself. Iris an literature student and she describes the world around her in first person narration through the filter of her heroines. Give it time and it will haunt you.

Roald Dahl: A Biography by Jeremy Treglown

Dahl was my hero as a child, I wanted to be a writer creating the amazing inventive imaginative intelligent child heroes I could want to be, not bullied for being intelligent but getting their own back on adults and evil contemporaries alike. Yes, he was notoriously misanthropic towards adults, didn't suffer fools and was bad tempered, but I had a father who was much the same, a mix of brilliant wit and unkindness, so genius coming with complete antipathy towards people was familiar to me.

Treglown takes us easily through the life of Dahl from his Welsh roots in a Norwegian community through service in the RAF and, after wounded, to a slightly shadowy life as a UK liaison officer in Washington, to the end of his life with his second wife and world wide fame as a major children's author. I learned many new things about Dahl's life and the tragedies that beset it, and came away with a sense of Dahl much as I had understood him and more, vain, self aggrandizing, social climber and in many ways not a very nice person, but deeply human.

Origami by Paulo Mulatinho

Well written, easy to follow projects for great fun items such as mice, pandas, pencils and boxes

The Chameleon's Shadow by Minette Walters (AUDIO)

Tightly plotted and well written, keeping the reader guessing until the last moment. Lietenant Charles Acland is on patrol in Iraq when his Scimitar tank is ambushed by a roadside bomb. Only he survives with extensive damage to one side of his face. He fails in his attempt to rejoin his unit and frustration, migraine and alienation lead to acts of violence culminating in him assaulting a stockbroker in a bar whose only crime is to be of Pakistani origin. He is hauled off by bodybuilder doctor part owner butch dyke Jackson (a brilliant character) whose compassion sets him on a new path.

The War Against Cliche by Martin Amis

I'm sure this collection of essays are brilliant to some people, but I found it arrogant, judgemental and not terribly interesting. Pulling an author to pieces ranks with boys pulling the wings off daddy long legeses in terms of how interested I am, so I never read beyond the first few.

Some Reflections on Madness and Worlds / Words

It is curious how books that I have picked up have fitted together and made me reflect. These are arbitrary occurences but perhaps not so random as they may seem. The White Darkness and Timequake were both books that I had identified as ones I wanted to read and they happened to be available from the library at the same time, albeit from different libraries (we are a rural region and the library stock of books is spread over several small towns, storage and the mobile libraries, it is fun to visit unfamiliar ones). The Raw Shark Texts is my own, a book I bought a while ago and sits with the pile of other books set on their sides to accusingly remind me 'you meant to read me, well, come on'.

These three books are all in their own ways about worlds and words. The White Darkness deals in part with a man's belief in a hollow globe with spheres within spheres, accessed by holes at the north and south poles. It is a madness that drives him to kill and in his obsession drag the daughter of his dead partner to the south pole to access this hole. Her defence from the truth is in words, a litany of names for the different types of ice and the sculptures created by ice and wind that bewitch the eye and mind. I was listening to this on a PlayAway mp3 player, a device that allowed me to be listening to stories of the arctic whilst walking up rather less chilly roads but still cold November in Scotland. Both Sim and Victor are balanced on the edge of madness, Sim locked away in her mind with Titus, a madness that ultimately saves her, and Victor believing in something we're never quite sure isn't untrue, it is a darkness that makes us question our own sanity and ideas of obsession and truth

I had simultaneously been reading Kurt Vonnegut's Timequake, his quirky semiautobiographical musings on life, there's some really deep stuff in there but Vonnegut treads lightly, like Pratchett and Adams (Douglas) cloaking the intelligence in humour. Here there is no question, this is clearly science fiction and any kind of insanity is freely allowed. You can laugh at the madness.

In The Raw Shark Texts, which I devoured (no pun intended), the madness is unclear and we are constantly on quicksand. Hall brutally reminds us that as readers we are at the mercy of writers, especially when they are as compelling as this and I could not tear myself away from the unfolding terror. Who is to say that dementia is not the product of predators feeding on our memories, it can certainly feel like that when you touch on the horror, like a sore tooth, of the idea of losing your memories and therefore sense of what you are, what you did, what your values created and what you were responsible for. The idea of looking into a face of a beloved and all they are being gone, replaced by a blank minded stranger. The way Hall plays with text as well as the concepts of word/worlds is brilliant, and I thank Ballard that I'd read some of his stuff before reading this, I might not have coped with the swerves of unreality and Hall's demands that you hold two contradictory opinions of events (is it all in Eric's mind, or is it real) right up until the end.

With all three books the brink of madness is a subject, strange that I'd come to them together but I've learned not to question synchronicty too much, it comes because it does. Being reminded that our worlds are constructions of our perception can be terrifying until you realise that this is all we have and taking security in that, these worlds ARE our worlds and to live in them completely is all we can do in our limitations, Tralfalmadorians may pity us unable to see the great sweep of time but I like perception the way we have it...

Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut

According to Vonnegut this is Timequake #2 because he wasn't very happy with the first version and rewrote it. It is on one level an account of his life and the times he met Kilgore Trout, familiar to readers as Vonnegut's alter ego in Slaughterhouse 5, and the timequake, an event that takes place on 13 February 1991 and when the entire world is thrown back 10 years and lives those 10 years again without any free will. Chaos ensues when free will returns after the 10 years and airline pilots, drivers, and people in general do not realise that the plane / train / car / bike / feet will no longer continue without their direction. Vonnegut messes around with our concepts of time, free will and history but in the funniest, gentlest way.

The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall

Eric Sanderson regains consciousness and breathing upon the carpet of a room he does not recognise and, on further probing within himself, without any memories whatsoever. A letter instructs him how to get to a Dr Randall who informs him that since he was traumatised by the death of his girlfriend Clio four years earlier he has suffered complete loss of memory, and that this is his 11th occurence. A room in his house is locked. Dr Randall warns him not to read the post that arrives through his door but eventually the Bluebeard moment occurs and Eric gives into the urge. He and us are then pitched into a world where the boundaries shift and Eric is pursued by a Ludovician shark, a conceptual predator that feeds on his memories and is determined to swallow him whole. Deeply moving, confusing, and very very intelligent

The White Darkness by Geraldine McCaughrean (AUDIO)

An utterly strange and gripping book. Sym has a man in her life, a companion who loves and guides her all the way to the Antarctic with her uncle (not her actual uncle), only, this companion is Lawrence Oates, known as Titus. The Oates who walked out of Scott's tent on their doomed trek to the South Pole with the immortal words 'I may be gone some time'. The text is peppered with quote and illusions that reveal Sym's deep intelligence, humanity and naivite. From a first person perspective the horror of this tight plot and the closing net around Sym in the white desert is completely compelling.

The Relic Master by Catherine Fisher

The Relic Master is science fiction / fantasy at its best, tightly plotted and beautifully written. We are introduced to the world of Anara through the eyes of Raffi, an apprentice to Galen of the Old Order, outlaws that are intimately connected with the world around them, practice magic and follow the teachings of the Makers, shadowy god-like beings that came from beyond the stars. They are pursued by the Watch who belive the magic of the Old Order is illusion. The Old Order uses relics, odd pieces of debris of the Makers' culture that are tantalisingly recognisable to us, a CD, a watch. On their pilgramage to Tasceron, a post apocalypic city devastated by the war between the Order and the Watch, they are joined by the Watch spy Carys and a Sekoi, an indigenous Anaran half cat half human being. Fisher writing is so good everything is believable and well realised, an author I'm happy to have found.