Blogs: My Books 
I’ll try to review the books I’ve read, so it’s more than just a list of books
The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald
I purchased The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald as part of my search for a new genre. I wish I hadn’t.
The book is translated from the original German retaining the prose style of a German. The prose is praised in the reviews on the back cover, but in my (admittedly limited) experience, German writing is long-winded, verbose and unclear. This is no exception. I don’t think the style helps the narrative at all.
The narrative is a collection of largely rambling stories loosely held together by one man’s travels along the Suffolk coast. I think it would be better if it were simply written as a collection of essays instead. The essays are introduced by such devices as a certain thing reminding the author of this or that or he comes across someone who tells him about how it was back in the day or some such. These devices are obvious and fill this reader with dread at the thought of yet another long-winded diversion into pastures new. If each were presented as a simple essay, there would be no need for this tedium.
The essays themselves might well be interesting if it weren’t for the heavy, dull, rambling prose. Paragraph breaks are few and far between, sentences can be long. It’s possible to read huge swathes without taking anything in, so rereading chunks is inevitable. Furthermore, there is little clarity, leading to an inability to follow what’s happening. Perhaps I’m just stupid, or perhaps it’s because I didn’t pay close enough attention to it.
On the plus side I did like the pictures in it. A full colour edition would be worth investing in if you really like the book.
In conclusion, this could have been an entertaining, informative collection of essays, but the execution falls short because of the prose and the decision to write it as tales conjured up by the travels of the author. If you are able to cope with this style and linkage, then you will enjoy this book very much.
In need of a new genre
I have read crime thrillers for yonks now. I have enjoyed reading various series, such as Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks series, Lee Child’s Reacher series, Kathy Reichs’ Tempe Brennan series and Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch series. This was all well and good while there were plenty of books to go in the series, but now I am stymied because I have come to the most recent book in each series — except the Cat Who… books by Lilian Jackson Braun, the next of which isn’t in on the shelf in Heffers or Waterstones; it’s on my Amazon wishlist, though (hint, hint!) — in paperback, which is my preferred format because paperback books take up less shelf space, which is scarce in my house.
Novels in paperback typically come in two sizes: what I call normal sized and tall paperbacks. You might have guessed that I prefer the smaller, normal sized one. Recently, more and more books seem to be of the larger size. This irritates me because I have double rows of novels on each shelf, so having a tall paperback makes the shelf look untidy because not only are tall paperbacks taller, but they’re also wider.
The nice man in Heffers told me the penultimate time I was in there that tall paperbacks are B size boks and normal ones are A. He said people prefer the B size ones because they’re easier to read. I find them more floppy. I pointed out that tall paperbacks are environmentally unfriendly (everyone’s very up-in-arms about that, so I thought this was a good argument against the tall paperback!) because you need more paper to print a tall paperback than a normal one. You might be thinking that this isn’t true because you can get more words on a page in the tall paperback one, but it doesn’t work like that. They simply enlarge the size of the writing. The nice man saw my point and said he would pass it on to the publishers, although he wasn’t sure how much good it would do.
Publishers also keep changing the style of the cover design in a series and so it looks odd when you begin buying books with one style, then suddenly it changes to another. Some of the earlier books in my Harry Bosch series have the newer style, because I missed them out at first because I didn’t read them in the right order to start with, being naively unaware it was a series. And now it seems that even though the cover style stays the same, the size of the book changes, for example the Tempe Brennan books. The most recent of those in paperback is only available in the tall size, much to my annoyance. I don’t know whether to just buy it or to wait for it to come out it normal paperback, if it ever will. Anyway, I digress.
In Heffers yesterday, I looked through the crime thrillers, and didn’t fancy any. Another problem is that I don’t know which ones I’ve got and which ones I haven’t, unless I make a concerted effort to remember these things or to write them down. LibraryThing isn’t as useful as it could be because there doesn’t appear to be a mobile version of the site, so when I did try to access it with my phone once in Heffers to see if I already had such-and-such a book, it took so long to load part of the page, I gave up and didn’t buy anything. I thought to myself, I need a new genre.
I hadn’t a clue what genre I wanted to read, though, so I went to the general fiction shelves, which foxed poor Colin, when he was fed up of being in Heffers. After judging several books by their size, author, title and spine, and some even by their blurb, I finally picked up one by David Lodge, Deaf Sentence. The blurb starts “Retired professor of linguistics…”. Well, I had to get that, being a linguist and all. I read the rest of the blurb, and it seemed quite interesting, so I thought I’d get it. I typically buy novels in threes; don’t ask me why because I don’t know. It’s nothing to do with the three for two offers often found in book shops. So I only had two more to find.
I spotted Colin on at least his second trek round the shop looking for me. He’d been to the crime fiction section and presumably the languages and linguistics section, and was looking decidedly narked by this point. I should point out that if the general fiction novels shelves carried on the straight line from the stairs down from crime fiction, he’d have seen me easily, but they jut out slightly before going back against the wall, so I was hidden. I caught up to him, and enlisted his help on finding two more books. He had no choice really, because he wanted to leave and I wasn’t going anywhere till I’d got my three books. Eventually, I also got Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald because it’s set in East Anglia and Tangled Roots by Sue Guiney because, well, I’m not sure, really. It just seemed different.
Deaf Sentence and The Rings of Saturn are tall paperbacks, and Tangled Roots is what I call a hardback size paperback, which I especially hate. They have to go on a special shelf with the genuine hardbacks because they’re so big.
The Surrogate by Tania Carver
A woman answering the door is quickly dispatched by a slash to the throat before the obvious target is drugged and her baby is taken from her womb. The woman is left to die. Despite this attack coming hot on the heels of two similar murders, they are unrealistically not really linked by police at first. When, at last, they are, a confusing plot is revealed, with too little explanation for a satisfying end.
Even worse is the relationship between the police detective protagonist and the forensic psychologist brought in to assist with the investigation. The two have worked together before, which ended with the badly coming after her in her office at the University of Essex. Of course, the copper rescued her in the nick of time. The relationship ended then, which is just as well, because she was living with her partner, an older man, who she didn’t really love, but he provided her with stability. And we’re supposed to empathise with this woman? I think she’s awful. Nor do I like the copper.
All in all, this book contains all the hallmarks of the modern crime thriller, such as maverick cop, bad relationships, which really spoils what is actually a decent plot. This is a debut novel, and once Carver settles into it, creating likeable characters and losing some of the cliches, I think she could become one of my favourites. Fingers crossed!
Dead until Dark by Charlaine Harris
Colin bought me a book he saw the other day called Dead until Dark by Charlaine Harris. It is the first in a series, and was first published in 2001.
Vampires are accepted as people who suffer from a virus causing them to be allergic to daylight, garlic and silver. The virus story is political correct nonsense or vampiric propaganda, depending on how you look at it, but the upshot is that vampires are recognised and accepted by society. Mostly.
Sookie Stackhouse can read minds. She mainly tries not to, so appears a bit simple a lot of the time because of the mental effort required to keep everyone’s thoughts out of her head.
Sookie lives in a small town where vampires rarely go. Until Bill walks in. The Rats are used to make sure Bill and Sookie meet properly, if you can call it that, and to show us that both Sookie and especially Bill can be violent when necessary: when the murders begin, the suspicion naturally falls on Bill. But someone else appears to have a motive, someone close to Sookie, who appears to fit the victim specification.
I really enjoyed reading this book. Naturally, there was the curiosity of how vampires could be made to fit in with human life, for example, what about all the blood-sucking and killing people and so on. Also, there was the plot, which was your typical serial killer, but in atypical circumstances, which is an interesting twist. I found myself more and more unable to put this book down as I progressed through it. Despite the seriousness of the plot, it was fun and well written, in that I didn’t find any particularly grating expressions. Often, I find that the author is trying to hard not to use verbs like “say” or to find some novel turn of phrase, but really, that sort of thing can interfere with the story. Anyway, I’ve definitely been left wanting more!
This edition of the book was printed specially to tie in with the series made from the books, TrueBlood, which, very conveniently, is to be shown on Channel 4 starting from next week. I can hardly wait for the next book – I want to see what direction Harris takes the characters in – and for the telly series, although I wouldn’t have cast her as Sookie and definitely not him as Bill just on their appearances. To my knowledge, I haven’t seen either acting before, but I’m hoping they’re going to be good nevertheless.