It was April then, that I found myself once again and not for the first time passing that bat tree. A dark silhouette, on a small canvass, impressive in size and scope, alive with its many occupants, just a block off Victoria park, where we would stroll in the evening, all too often in the company of our 3 cats, unleashed but decidedly with us, as we sang our little ditties and inhaled the atmosphere about us.The bat tree stood on a small raised patch of earth, reinforced by wood, sitting much higher, than the land about it. It was here, with collar and cuff against the April wind that I sat down and let Paul Edgecombe, bull goose screw of E block, Cold Mountain, tell me more about that mouse, Eduard Delacroix, Old Sparky and his guards, up close and personal like. Among the latter, Brutus Howell; Brutal to his friends, a mild as a mouse himself, brick wall of a man and Percy Wetmore, still mean, just a nasty little slip of shit; one with a gun and a hickory baton.
But it is King’s searing portrayal of skinny, pimply assed, psychopath Wild Bill Wharton, that seeped in and haunted me most, as I waited for the next installment of The Green Mile.
It was 1996 when I came across this, a happy accident, at my local 7-11, near the bat tree.It is 1932 when we first meet Paul Edgecombe, head screw, and our narrator and walk The Green Mile at Cold Mountain, where men are sent to pay their final due to Old Sparky, the electric chair.
It is the year that John Coffey came to Cold Mountain, convicted of brutally raping and killing two, near nine year old twin girls, an enormous man, a mountain in his own right, with wet, dark eyes and a humble, gentle nature.
King’s characterization skills shine here.
Percy Wetmore announces his arrival. “ Dead Man Walking” while his own, inner being fairly oozes off the page.
I loved the narrator’s voice, and I thought a good deal about what it would be like to have such a job as that.
And what to hell is up with that mouse?
King had me; the purchase of the second book in this series was no accident.
I think that this was a very courageous book for Stephen King to write. And I loved the casual, conversational tone as King shares with us, glimpse’s into his life both before and after his initial success. He doesn’t pull any punches either; we see the good, the bad and the ugly.
It is somehow, not at all, and exactly what I expected. In truth, I loved the memoir part best but even those parts that are instructional in the art of writing are very engaging.
Is it not incredible, that such a gifted, successful writer would willingly open up his own private chest, remove the tools hidden within and share his thoughts on each of them with, well anyone?
No doubt about it, this guy has chutzpah.
Here are the bits I loved:
The anecdotes from his childhood
Where ideas come from
His struggle and first big break
On Carrie
The love of his life
His brush with death
Practical advice (very accessible)
A challenge
I swear this man could write a book on how to boil water and make it interesting.
But don’t listen to me ………. listen to King:
Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.
You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.
If you want to be a writer you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.
Words have weight.
Let’s get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.
Words create sentences; sentences create paragraphs; sometimes paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe.
I’m a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, most fiction. I don’t read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read.
I have been having a difficult time writing this review. There I said it. Mostly, I think, because this story touched my inner bits. I did not anticipate that, nor did my soft, little underbelly. It is a sad story and I know and confess that for years and years I avoided these kinds of things, I was looking for happy, shiny thoughts, not this, so it is funny then, that it has also brought back memories of the very best chapters of my life.I don’t even know where to begin.
This book read me.
It is strong and tender, quietly whispering, gently hovering; it tells you things you already knew, but needed to hear, out loud.
It is a book of sorrow and regret,love and hope, the real, inner voice stuff.
This book is beautiful but, more than that, well beyond that……… it is also surprisingly joyful and deeply evocative. I was left gasping and glowing in it's aftermath.
It is not my book, at all really, but my daughter’s and she will likely think I read it in the rain or snow, but those are just my tears. Prolific tears, who knew.
I first heard about this from karen, whose review convinced me to read it, thank you! I shall, however always associate this incredible work with my daughter Arah-Leah, whose very book, I hold within my hands and who lives within the very best chapters of my life.
This is Astrid’s story.We meet her first when she is twelve and in Ingrid’s (her mother) care.
Ingrid is a woman of such rare, unearthly beauty as to be most likely found in dreams.
Fitch describes her through Astrid’s eyes, gradually, poetically, using very sparse language, as the story unfolds, with words that sing, the pages glistening with the image reflected from her eyes.
The Santa Anas blew in hot from the desert, shrivelling the last of the spring grass into whiskers of pale straw. Only the oleanders thrived, their delicate poisonous blossoms, their dagger green leaves. We could not sleep in the hot dry nights, my mother and I. I woke up at midnight to find her bed empty. I climbed to the roof and easily spotted her blonde hair like a white flame in the light of the three-quarter moon.
I sat next to her, and we stared out at the city that hummed and glittered like a computer chip deep in some unknowable machine, holding its secret like a poker hand. The edge of her white kimono flapped open in the wind and I could see her breast, low and full. Her beauty was like the edge of a very sharp knife.
Ingrid also covets beauty in all its many forms.
Beauty was my mother’s law, her religion. You could do anything you wanted as long as you were beautiful, as long as you did things beautifully. If you weren’t, you just didn’t exist. She had drummed it into my head since I was small.
She becomes so wrapped up in her own world, her own needs that Astrid’s no longer filter through.
We swam in the hot aquamarine of the pool, late at night, in the clatter of palms and the twinkle of the new-scoured sky. My mother floated on her back, humming to herself. “God, I love this." She splashed gently with her fingers, letting her body drift in a slow circle. "Isn't it funny. I am enjoying my hatred so much more than I ever enjoyed love. Love is tempermental. Tiring. It makes demands. Love uses you. Changes its mind.” Her eyes were closed. Beads of water decorated her face, and her hair spread out from her head like jellyfish tendrils. “But hatred, now. That's something you can use. Sculpt. Wield. It's hard or soft, however you need it. Love humiliates you, but hatred cradles you. It's so soothing."
When Ingrid is imprisoned Astrid is fostered out to a series of homes in Los Angeles, her mother, an ever present part of the baggage that she carries with her.
This is such a beautifully written story. So simple, the words arranged to please the ear, one after the other, melodic in their cadence and rhythm. But Astrid’s is not a pretty story.
I gave her to the quiet boy with short cropped hair and straggly beard, followed the fat boy back into the bushes behind the bathrooms. He unbuckled his pants, pushed them down over his hips. I knelt on a bed of pine needles, like a supplicant, like a sinner. Not like a lover. He leaned against the white stucco wall of the bathroom as I prayed with him in my mouth, his hands in my hair.
It is too real, too raw, to conform to anyone’s preconceived notion of beauty. And yet Fitch makes it sing, with her beautiful, simple words.
I left walking backwards so I wouldn’t miss a moment of her. I hated the idea of going back to Marvel’s, so I walked around the block, feeling Olivia's arms around me, my nose full of perfume and the smell of her skin, my head swirling with what I had seen and heard in the house, so much like ours, and yet not at all. And I realised as I walked through the neighborhood how each house could contain a completely different reality. In a single block, there could be fifty separate worlds. Nobody ever really knew what was going on just next door.
As I read this I became overwhelmed with the number of passages that I wanted to secrete away, to take out, and read again. Perhaps that explained the worn and tattered condition of the book I held within my hands, pages yellowing, stained and dog-eared or soiled in some other way by the fingers of less careful readers.
Truly (I have done it several times now) I can let this fall open to any page and find one of these passages.
That was the thing about words, they were clear and specific-chair, eye, stone- but when you talked about feelings, words were too stiff, they were this and not that, they couldn't include all the meanings. In defining, they always left something out.
Don’t miss a word……..read this one for yourselves.
Tired of your workaday lives,Need to get away for a while?
Come, sit a spell
Let Susanna tell you a story.
We go to England in the 1800’s, a time of the Napoleonic Wars, a time when most people believe magic to be dead in England. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell are two magicians attempting, each in their own way, to change that and restore magic to England.
I can admit that it took me a while to find my legs here, acquire my own rhythm with the writing and the story. In many ways this reads like a history lesson... The entire aspect and nature of magic and its history are all carefully and explicitly laid out, fully annotated with historical references that appear as footnotes (which while bitter at first, soon became delicious little bits that nourished and enriched). I came to crave them. Lord Byron and the Duke of Wellington, both, put in an appearance here, casually lending their historical pertinence, as England’s Prime Minister and his cabinet employ the magicians to assist in the battle against Napoleon.
Susanna so deftly describes the two main protagonists, the magicians, so intricately, as to impart an intimate understanding of each of them. As opposite in character as they are in appearance Strange & Norrell command this stage, but along the way they share the spotlight, with a whole cast of others, people, that step right off the page:
The man extracted himself from the hedge. This was no easy task because various parts of it – hawthorn twigs, elder branches, strands of ivy, mistletoe and witches broom – had insinuated themselves among his clothes, limbs and hair during the night or glued themselves to him with ice. He sat up. He did not seem in the least surprised to find he had an audience; one would almost have supposed from his behaviour that he had been expecting it. He looked at them all and gave several disparaging sniffs and snorts.
He ran his fingers through his hair, removing dead leaves, bits of twig and half a dozen earwigs. “I reached out my hand” he muttered, to no-one in particular. “England’s rivers turned and flowed the other way.” He loosened his neckcloth and fished out some spiders which had taken up residence inside his shirt. In doing so, he revealed that his neck and throat were ornamented with an odd pattern of blue lines, dots, crosses and circles. Then he wrapped his neckcloth back about his neck and, having thus completed his toilet to his satisfaction, he rose to his feet.
“My name is Vinculus”, he declared.
What I loved most, as I listened to Susanna’s story was that it took me away, where a slow and curious sort of calm came over me. A kind of a hush, seemingly impenetrable, descended about me. A strange sense of quiet fell, like one might find in the wee hours of the morning. I relaxed, shook off the shackles of day to day and settled in, wholly immersed now and in no particular hurry, on this long, long journey. I stretched out my legs, met the man with the thistle-down hair and considered the colour of a heartache. I visited ballrooms and battlefields, travelled faerie roads, and searched for the Raven King. I watched the birds as they came to my feeder and fell away, to lost-hope house and all the mirrors of the world, utterly enchanted, and I believed.
It was as if a door had opened somewhere. Or possibly a series of doors. There was a sensation as of a breeze blowing into the house and bringing with it the half- remembered scents of childhood. There was a shift in the light which seemed to cause all the shadows in the room to fall differently. There was nothing more definite than that, and yet, as often happens when some magic is occurring, both Drawlight and the lady had the strongest impression that nothing in the visible world could be relied upon any more. It was as if one might put out one’s hand to touch any thing in the room and discover it was no longer there.
A tall mirror hung upon the wall above the sopha where the lady sat. It shewed a second great white moon in a second tall dark window and a second dim-mirror room. But Drawlight and the lady did not appear in the mirror room at all. Instead there was a kind of an indistinctness, which became a sort of shadow, which became the dark shape of someone coming towards them. From the path which this person took, it could clearly be seen that the mirror room was not like the original at all and that it was only by odd tricks of lighting and perspective – such as one might meet with in the theatre- that they appeared to be the same. It seemed that the mirror room was actually a long corridor.
The hair and coat of the mysterious figure were stirred by a wind which could not be felt in their own room and though he walked briskly towards the glass which separated the two rooms, it was taking him some time to reach it. But finally he reached the glass and then there was a moment when his dark shape loomed very large behind it and his face was still in shadow.
Susanna Clarke tells a story that spills over with wonder.
This one is coming to the island with me.
3.5 starsI can’t believe that I am sitting here thinking about this review while Hurricane Sandy’s imminence is being trumpeted just outside my door.
Makes you think…..
The story itself is about global warming. It’s a cautionary tale really. On the one hand you have some radical environmentalists/ scientists who are not above manipulating the environment in order to support their fund raising goals. I mean people will dig deeper into their pockets if they have been personally impacted by global warming, right.
Attempting at every turn to stay ahead of these ecological terrorists is a filthy rich, environmental philanthropist, his lawyer and Kenner, a professor of geo-environmental engineering at MIT and secret agent for an unnamed national security organization.
And the chase is on; as we follow these groups around the world from the glaciers of Iceland and volcanoes of Antarctica, through the streets of Paris to a remote Pacific island crawling with cannibals.
As I read this story I really thought that it was Crichton’s voice I heard whenever Kenner was speaking, which he does a lot, while sharing his own views on global warming. It can get a little preachy, but for me the story was solid enough to get past that.
There is a chilling taste like people scene that quite effectively raised the hackles on the back of my neck.
A cogent theme throughout is the role of politics and fund raising in shaping scientic research.
Extremely well researched and hey I enjoyed it.
There is so much more to the reading experience than the mere consumption of words on a page. No…. I love me the look and feel and smell of an actual book. My mind remembers these things, the cover art, the heft and sense of the page, how some fall open and give them selves up to you while others can be heavy, cumbersome, high maintenance reads. I remember the print or type face, whatever the right term is, my mind is able to recreate these images and sensations as I recall a particular experience or revisit a favoured passage, reminisce over long, lost lyrics, selected poems.
I have a coveted Bronte book that I love to leave laying about, offering ample opportunity to pick up and touch, open, experience again.
Sometimes all of these many elements converge, conspire if you will, to deliver the whole package. It is then that a sort of magic emerges, infusing every page. Take this example; it actually feels like silk when I pick it up, no shit, real silk and the cover art..... classic, elegant, simple; effectively conveying a sense of mystery. It calls out, from my peripheral, beckoning.
Even the print, I mean I know this must sound ridiculous but it actually supports and envelopes; embraces the pace and tone and rhythm of this story. Call me crazy or trust me, it just all works. Well!
I have never read an actual Arthur Conan Doyle story so I cannot speak to the authenticity of this recreation of Sherlock Holmes. What I can say is that I sure did enjoy this and it feels somehow authentic, in keeping with my already gleaned knowledge of this character. I was swept away to London and 221B Baker Street, to Holmes & Watson and a story that longed to be told………
And tell me, Mr. Horowitz did, never once losing my attention whilst he spoke... I was in an automatic sort of, sensual overdrive, throughout.
Breathing……………….
That was excellent she said, thank you, I need a smoke.
Going In: okay so right away it needs to be said that some time ago I stumbled, while scrolling through my home page, across a comment made by a member, regarding a review of this work. It was within that comment, that one or two sentence structure, not hidden or disguised in any way, I mean at that point I was not even reading the review in question, that the ultimate spoiler for this story was revealed to me. Has that affected the experience of this read? Of course, I mean……I knew, I knew… There is no unknowing. One should not be able to stumble so effortlessly across this kind of thing and so it is that I urge all of you to please be careful and considerate of other readers out there folks.
Still…………..what a great story this is.
Nick Dunne gets a call from a neighbour one day who alerts him to the fact that his front door is wide open and his cat is out and about. When Nick goes home to check things out he discovers that his wife Amy is missing and evidence of a struggle within their home.
I really do not want to say much more as this is a story easily spoiled for would be readers, however it is a creepy, psychological study, an inside look at just how little we really know about each other. Even our partners in life, may have secrets, thoughts, inner feelings of which we often remain blissfully unaware.
In Gone Girl, Amy and Nick’s relationship is dissected, their true selves revealed, an autopsy if you will, with the entrails of each laid bare on the coroner’s table and you dear reader have a ringside seat.
This is a gripping, thumb sweating, compulsive read. Even armed with my unsolicited, spoiler knowledge this story soared. Hands down one of the best thrillers I have ever read.
A small shout out to Trudi whose excellent review of this work convinced me to pick it up.
1
I agree with all the other goodread’s voices that say this, is an easy five stars. Done. Even though I have seen the movie at least twice and I am a consistent King fan, with, okay, a couple of exceptions, this story reeled me in from the get go. Is it dark and horrifying? Why yes it is, indeed, I would add that anyone seriously interested in writing great suspense, should pay close attention. It is told by a Master.
The movie positively pales in comparison.
Read it! Everybody should.
Stephen King says it best. My idea of a sweet ride is three days of rain, a fridge filled with snacks, and a new Linwood Barclay. Right on. I picked this one up at the beginning of my last weekend. I just happened to be in my sweet spot………ready to select my next read.
King also said that it’s a tale Hitchcock would have loved and once again, he is spot on.
I have come to think of Barclay’s books as domestic thrillers. These things could happen to you or me. Today or tomorrow. This one is top notch!
It is the story of two brothers; one, Thomas, is a map- obsessed schizophrenic with a computer and a program that leads him through the streets of this world. His brother, Ray, has just returned home to deal with their father’s recent, accidental death and hopefully to bond and work with Thomas so as to forge a plan for Thomas’s future care.
But while Thomas is sitting at his computer, clicking and trolling streets in New York City, he sees an image in a window. An image that looks like a woman being murdered. And so it begins…………
Riveting, Thrilling, Suspenseful, Gripping, Accessible…….. Yes, Yes, Yes and yes. Still for me the first word that comes to mind is ENTERTAINING!
HUGELY SO
I’m getting me another Linwood Barclay.
Birdman
No matter where I lay this book, it immediately improved the visual aspects of that space. True, even when it lay half hazard amid the detritus of day to day. And it is not only the visual aspects that appeal; there is a feeling of what? present. And you’re drawn back, again, considering. This book doesn’t just reside here, it rocks, it rolls, it rules. Great and clever cover art!Which brings us to the story and it’s a good one. Meet British, Detective Inspector Jack Caffery. He is young, driven and methodical but he is also haunted by the long ago disappearance of his brother Ewan as a child.
In the opening, the dead bodies of five women are found, dumped in a wasteland, near the Millennium Dome in Greenwich, England. They have all been horribly, brutally mutilated and carry a singular, macabre signature. Not even one of these women has been reported missing, suggesting the killer has taken some care in selecting his victims.
Hayder pulls no punches here as she takes you on a slow and sinister creep ride into the world of a sexual sadist, through the corridors of crime most foul. Warning though, this one is not for the faint of heart.
I confess I was reminded of Harris’s Hannibal Lecter as I read this, none the less it is written well enough to stand on its own. This marks the first Mo Hayder novel I have read. It will not be the last.
Smell, they say, is the strongest of the senses.Hmmmmm
I remember a time, years ago, on the beach.
I could smell the lake, the night air
Feel the Harley spinning out of control as it hit the sand. No pain just
The smell of wet leather and silk
Bob Seger singing
Moonlit endless sand
The taste of beer and cigarettes
His scent……..mine….mingled.
That’s the thing about smell; it commands an immediate and visceral response. It is instinctive, automatic; void of conscious thought or will, all the while affecting a wide range of behaviours; emotion, motivation …..memory.
Perfume is an olfactory experience. Murder most monstrous is afoot. Suskind takes you on a bloody, smelly, insane quest.
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.As he makes his way across this vast, bleak and desolate landscape, he meets people, has sex, forms friendships. Bullets fly……people die.
The gunslinger has bad, equally bleak and desperate dreams and flashbacks. The man in black eludes him.
For me the best part of this story was the conversation between Roland (the gunslinger) and Walter (the man in black) near the end of this segment of the journey and King’s own afterword.
Nothing much actually happens here but we learn some things along the way, things which are integral to the rest of this colossal fantasy.
Remember, this is King, so have faith and do read some of the reviews here on goodreads. That was enough to motivate me to pick up and read the second book in this series which more than makes up for the flat, bareness of this offering.
Most of us are all too familiar with the atrocities of the Holocaust.Most of us cannot let our minds and hearts forget the unbelievable destruction of Japan and it’s people as a result of America unleashing the atomic bomb.
In Unbroken, Laura Hillenbrand has focused her research and her unique narrative voice to tell us the true story of Louis Zamperini, an American bombardier, whose plane crashed during a search mission over the Pacific.
What follows then is an unforgettable, chilling and extraordinary story of survival, resilience and redemption.
I know, I know…..these are the same words that appear on the very cover of the book itself. In my defence all I can say is that this really is a testament to man's ability to survive when driven to the absolute limits of endurance and beyond.
Hillenbrand's writing is extraordinary. She brings this story to life, letting it unfold over the reader's eyes with a clarity that is nigh on cinematic.
You really must see this for yourselves. This is not a book one reads, rather an experience one will never forget.
Originally published in a weekly periodical between late 1859 and 1860 as a serial story, this is believed to be the first English crime detection novel. This is Victorian fiction that combines romance, mystery and Gothic horror with a psychological twist.The story opens with an eerie encounter, in the dead of night on a moonlit London road.
In one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop… There, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth…stood the figure of a solitary woman, dressed from head to foot in white.
Collins had me at hello. This is the story of what a woman’s patience can endure, and what a man’s resolution can achieve. I loved the fly on the wall perspective of events as revealed through a series of narrators, starting with Walter Hartright, drawing master of the time and place, who introduced me to Marian Halcombe thusly;
The instant my eyes rested on her, I was struck by the rare beauty of her form, and by the unaffected grace of her attitude. Her figure was tall, yet not too tall; comely and well developed, yet not fat; her head sat on her shoulders with an easy, pliant firmness; her waist, perfection in the eyes of man, for it occupied it’s natural place, it filled out its natural circle, it was visibly and delightfully undeformed by stays. She had not heard my entrance into the room; and I allowed myself the luxury of admiring her for a few moments, before I moved one of the chairs near me, as the least embarrassing means of attracting her attention. She turned towards me immediately. The easy elegance of every movement of her limbs and body as soon as she began to advance from the far end of the room, set me in a flutter of expectation to see her face clearly. She left the window – and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps – and I said to myself, The lady is young. She approached nearer – and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words fail me to express), The lady is ugly!
Marian knows who she is, personally and as a woman in Victorian society. She reflects these qualities and embraces society’s expectations with elegance and grace, deftly, slowly, surely and quite successfully disarming her male audience and the reader with her charming, disarming, demeanour that both mirrors and ever so subtly mocks those expectations. Never have I been so invested in a character. I adore and applaud her. She is simply one of the most deftly drawn, beautiful and complex renderings I have ever encountered in the written word.
Without a doubt it is Collins characters that both support and propel this story, each in their own unique voice, of which Marian is but one. All brilliantly drawn and cleverly revealed as time goes by. It is a classic, therefore it is wordy, with long drawn out, highly descriptive sentences that go on and on and on as they slowly, persistently tug you forward.
No matter! I lapped up every word.