10 Most Attractive Men in a 2019 Film

2018's list, in case you wanted to get a flavour for Emsy's taste in Hollywood hunks!

10. Lakeith Stanfield, Knives Out (new entrant)

Bar review: ADVENTURE BAR (Clapham High Street)

Having visited and reviewed the Adventure Bar in Covent Garden, I postulated whether the chain's venues outside of central London were better than the flagship one. The fact that DUSK (a terrific app that allows you have a free drink a night) featured Adventure Bar when I happened to be at Clapham Junction, meant I could put this hypothesis to the test.

Album review: REPUTATION (Taylor Swift)

A month shy of turning 28, Taylor Swift has been around the block and suffered a few knocks to her standing (not to mention her heart) for her troubles. Her sixth album comes at some time when some self-reflection is much-needed.

With a title like ‘Reputation’, she’s certainly cognisant of that artefact. It would be trite to dub her 15-track album as a ‘confessional’, as she’s always been very forthcoming about wearing her heart on her sleeve, and channelling her painful life experiences into song-writing inspiration, but there's a salient self-awareness in this album that was perhaps lacking in her previous work.

LFF Film review: ON CHESIL BEACH (Dominic Cooke, 2018)

Summer 1962. In a Dorset hotel, overlooking the seaside, two virgins, Edward and Florence, navigate their wedding night with shared trepidation, although the root of their anxiety are worlds apart. He, a History graduate from a humble but loving home, can’t wait to get his hands on his beautiful bride. She, a talented violinist from a richer family, is filled with revulsion at the thought of sexual contact with anyone.

Book review: THE LOST SYMBOL (Dan Brown)

Robert Langdon, the Harvard professor whose impressive cognitive abilities was put through their paces in Angels and Demons and then The Da Vinci Code, finds himself at the centre of another mystery. This time, it involves the kidnapping of his close friend, Peter Solomon, a renowned member of the Freemasons. Along with Peter’s scientist sister Katherine, Langdon must piece together the fragmented clues to get Solomon’s abductor the information he strives, if he wishes to see his friend alive again.

Book review: DAUGHTER (Jane Shemilt)

Although Jane Shemilt writes in lucid, gripping prose, her first novel suffers from several flaws.

Film review: SOMEONE TO TALK TO [一句顶一万句] (Liu Yulin, 2016)

A couple get married, full of love and hope for their future together. Several years down the line, they barely speak a word to each other. Around their anniversary, one discovers the other has been cheating on them and filled with murderous rage, revenge becomes their raison d'être as they do everything they can to ruin their spouse's life.

Actually, I'm not retelling the plot for Gone Girl, but Liu Yulin's debut movie Someone to Talk to. Adapted from the 2011 Mao Dun Literature Prize, 一句顶一万句is an economical yet intimate look at what happens after the love has gone out of a marriage and feelings of resentment at having one's heart broken fester.

Niu Aigo (Hai Mao) is the jilted husband, who tries his best as the patriarch of the family, but unfortunately his modest earnings as a cobbler and simple vision for their future aren't to the pleasure of his wife, who has outgrown him, and has an affair with the wealthier local wedding planning magnate. The film is considerably less kind to her, and rightly so, given she makes comments that make her seem like a  right gold-digging shrew. Woman knew her husband was poor when he married her; she doesn't get to screw everything up when that slowly sinks in.

In only his second film role, Hai Mao is just wonderful as a man who, after being wronged, is all affront and sharp edges, until self-realisation (and a few convenient plot machinations) give him the self-realisation to let go and become a stronger person for it.

His character essentially goes through all five stages of grief through the course of the film, and in doing so, exhibits some spiteful colours. But it's a testament to Mao's humane, heartfelt performance that even at his lowest points, you're rooting for this guy to pull through. His character was reminiscent of John C. Reilly in Chicago, another pitiable cuckold, and it's rare that cinema not only focuses on the person who's been left behind, but the person who was left behind happens to be male.

Someone to Talk to also features a subplot about Aigo's older sister's ill-fated online dating adventures and how she eventually settles, because, as she matter-of-factly states, 'I'm 39. I couldn't get anyone younger'. This kind of pragmatic, frank dialogue makes Someone to Talk to by far the most honest Chinese film I've seen this year (although there's not much in the way of competition).

Liu Yulin directs the story in such an unfussy, natural manner, with a working class Chinese town as the backdrop, I was invested in the plot in a way other films with more frills have failed to achieve. One scene, where Aigo angrily takes his frustration at his wife gallivanting out on his young daughter, carried genuine pathos and was far more powerful than anything I watched in yesterday's manufactured, sappy, The Shite Between Oceans.

I like a good revenge flick a hell of a lot more thanas much as the next person. Films like Gone Girl and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo contain scenes which imbue me with sadistic wish fulfilment at various men who have wronged me. I myself can nurse a grudge for quite a while, although my modus operandi is significantly less bloody and a tad pettier than anything Amy Dunne or Lisbeth Salander confect; that bellend Stefan who racially abused me over a year ago is immortalised in my Fantasy Football team name, 'Stefan is a Kuntz'.

But there's a lot to be said for Someone to Talk To's more forgiving approach. 

Someone to Talk to is a sincere and profound look at loneliness and the multifaceted nature of marriage, elevated by the magnanimous treatment it gives its protagonist. It illustrates how toxic holding onto past transgressions can be, not just to oneself, but to those that we love. Ultimately, it encourages the protagonist and the audience to look beyond, not behind.

Perhaps it's time I, like Aigo, made like Elsa from Frozen, and Let It Go. Good news for Wasteman, Watford fan and The Wolf of Fleet Street, then.

8/10

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If you enjoyed this review, do check out my other ones, which include a fair few Chinese movies.

Book review: THE CASUAL VACANCY (JK Rowling)

 

Released last year to bated breaths and eager eyes, The Casual Vacancy is J.K. Rowling’s first foray into the adult-book market. Having held back from reading it when it first came out so I could savour every page and give the book the measured, impartial critic it deserved (the worry was that, had I devoured it so quickly like I did with the final Harry Potter book, I would miss nuances like I did with my first time reading of HP VII, so keen was I to get to the end of the saga), I found myself extremely disappointed with The Casual Vacancy, which was, at best, overly-detailed and ambitious, and at worst, a self-satisfied, muddling mess.

The action kicks off when well-loved Parish Councillor Barry Fairbrother bites the dust due to a surprise bout of aneurism in his brain. Initially, the townpeople of Pagford, the fictitious West Country town where the book is set, mourn his death, but soon, practicalities kick in. His death leaves a “casual vacancy” to be filled, and three men put themselves forward: Miles Mollison, a lawyer and family man is the frontrunner, being the son of Howard Mollison, the leader of the Parish Council, but there is also Deputy headteacher Colin Walls, who wants to run out of love of Barry, as well as bullying petty crook Simon Price, who, on hearing of the unofficial perks of being on the council, can’t resist the idea of receiving some bribes of his own.

Having penned the source material of the box office smashes Harry Potter, one can’t help but think Rowling has got half a mind of the movie rights of this book. For, whilst the setting, Pagford, is a small town, the themes of the book are anything but. Adultery, drugs, self-harm, racism, abuse, duplicity, you name it, this book’s got it. 

There are several families which come into focus, and the actions of each have repercussions on other people, some of these which trigger off a Domino effect into something much larger. But whilst this makes for interesting films, such as Magnolia or Short Cuts, on paper, it harder to keep track of, particularly at the start when she juggles between narratives and it is hard to keep up.

That is not to say the book is a total failure. As with Harry Potter, there are moments of extreme wit – her describing of a teenage boy band that one of the wives in the novel becomes obsessed with can only be sculpted on One Direction, and is an incisive comment on how little there is to live for when the spark goes out of a marriage. 

Similarly, in the latter act of the book, when the action really takes off and people begin posting on the Pagford town message board as The_Ghost_Of_Barry_Fairbrother, chaos, and dark humour, reigns. As with some of the later Harry Potter books, when Rowling gives the internal monologue of the characters in The Casual Vacancy, she offers a window into their psyches, however dislikeable, and it takes a some emotional acuity to do accomplish that.

But even as the most ardent Harry Potter fangirl, I cannot overlook all the flaws in this novel. 

First and foremost, it strives for so much, and in doing so, achieves so little. I read this book whilst also reading Tampa by Alissa Nutting and Cell by Stephen King, and compared to this book, the narratives of those two are so straight-forward and unpretentious, it made me want to cry tears of joy. 

Even if we put my inability to follow the plot down to me being a bit dense, there are other things – Rowling’s cartoonish description of a crack addict and the conditions she lives in could be lifted right out of an anti-drugs campaign they made for teenagers, so laden are they with caricature.

Very few characters in the novel are likeable. Sukhvinder Jawanda is one of the few that I liked, and it is credit to the novel that she gets a brief glimpse of redemption. But I despised pretty much everyone else in the novel, so much so that, when tragedy did strike at the end, that I was left with a hollow “so what?” feeling that contrasted with the endless tears I shed in reading the Harry Potter books, and even then, you could feel Rowling desperately trying, to no avail, to pull at her readers’ heartstrings. 

The teenagers are painted with sweeping generalisations, the majority of them being antagonistic, ungrateful to their parents and far more interested in getting laid than studying. Where has Rowling been getting information, episodes of Skins?

Where the teenagers are whiny little trolls, the adults are described as hypocrites who are only out for mercenary gain. They only think of themselves and aren’t able to see how their own kids are rebelling right under their eyes. Whilst no doubt haphazard parenting exists, for there to be so many poor parents, all so closely linked, beggars belief.

Recently, Miley Cyrus cringed out the world at the MTV Awards by “twerking” and basically just trying to shed her good girl image so much that it reeked of desperation and trying too hard. With The Casual Vacancy, JK Rowling is doing the literary version of exactly the same thing. Sex, drugs and gratuitous swearing (hell, I’m a tetchy football fan with an attitude problem and I don’t even swear as much as the saps in this novel do), I cringed on pretty much every page. 

That Rihanna’s Umbrella was shoehorned in as a motif throughout the novel just compounds the humiliation that was reading The Casual Vacancy.

Grade: F

For more of my book reviews, click here.

Book review: MURDER MOST FAB (Julian Clary)

Having just suffered his first love and heartbreak, Johnny Debonair is uprooted from his farmhouse in Kent to the big city, where his grandmother enrols him in drama school, believing the change will do him good. However, his classes are filled with self-absorbed people, who think too highly of themselves, and he soon becomes disillusioned with acting, long realising that he won’t be going anywhere with his pipe dream.

Film review: ANNA KARENINA (Joe Wright, 2012)

Adultery. It’s always made for some of the most delicious film, TV and book storylines. Indeed, between 1873 to 1877, Leo Tolstoy used it as the basis of his novel, which he published in eight parts. Joe Wright, always one for a literary classic (Pride & Prejudice, and to a lesser extent depending on how much you rate McEwan, Atonement), adapted this 19th century Russian lit classic to the big-screen. 

After scouting across the continent for filming locations, he finally settled for the unusual, somewhat Dogville-esque of having the vast majority of the film filmed on a stage. 

The big difference between Anna Karenina and Dogville however, though, is where the latter barely had any set at all, with the locations and props chalked into the wooden floorboard, the set of Anna Karenina, whilst discernibly all a stage, is vast and opulent, with moving backdrops and richly designed interiors aplenty. 

The purpose of Wright choosing to having the movie filmed on a stage was because he said that Anna felt like her entire life was “on a stage”, and, indeed, the scenes where she faces society and stylistic touches are added (such as dancing couples freezing into a tableau whilst she dances with Count Vronsky) are certainly very effective indeed.

TV review: SHERLOCK series 2 episode 1, A SCANDAL IN BELGRAVIA

Arriving in time for the New Year comes a second series of Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat’s wildly inventive Sherlock, which takes the classic stories from Arthur Conan Doyle and drops them directly in the hustle and bustle of modern London. 

Smartphones, blogs, laptops and fancy gadgetry all become part of the story-telling as Doyle’s clever creations are given a modern day spin. Leading all of this unlikely but massively successful creation are the odd couple of Benedict Cumberbatch as the genius yet friction-inducing eponymous detective, and Martin Freeman as his long-suffering army doctor companion, Doctor Watson.

Book review: SWIMMING POOL SUNDAY (Madeleine Wickham)

Louise Kember, separated wife and mother of two, decides to spend a hot Sunday afternoon with her daughters, Amelia and Katie, at the pool of wealthy local family the Delaneys, who open it once a year for charity. Sounds reasonable enough. Except that Sundays are supposed to be the day the girls spend with their father, Barnaby. He had made intricate plans of his own to go fishing with his girls, and now that his plans have been scuppered, he, hurt and bitter, is at the house to glower at Louise resentfully. However, the air soon turns even more sour when their youngest Katie fatally injures herself trying to dive, and suddenly the ill-feeling between Louise and Barnaby is just the beginning in the ensuing recriminations and drama that follow.

Madeleine Wickham (the real name of the author who, under alias Sophie Kinsella, penned the terrifically enjoyable Shopaholic series as well as one of my favourite chicklits of all time, Can You Keep a Secret?) generally tends to write in a slightly darker tone for the few books she’s released under he true name, and with the themes of greed, discontentment and grief in Swimming Pool Sunday, this is no exception. Furthermore, whether as Kinsella or Wickham, the author picks London as the backdrop to most of her stories, particularly the Chelsea/Kensington/Fulham area, where one can only assume is where she grew up. 

However, she chooses to set this novel in the countryside, something the protagonist Louise is less than satisfied with. After the initial romance experienced with her estranged husband Barnaby, comes the less-than-glamorous minutiae of being a mother. For someone who was once involved in the glitzy process of aiding her father in running for elections, this contrasts starkly with the life she’d dreamed of having, and her resentment at Barnaby’s willing to “settle” for a simpler life is one of the chief causes of their falling apart. Another is the arrival of a smarmy but sexy lawyer Cassian, who immediately sees Louise’s political connections as a route into getting what he wants. It is he who suggests that Louise and Barnaby sue the Delaneys for Katie’s accident, and after some swift and ill-advised thinking, the beleaguered parents are soon on board.

In the Delaney’s household, however, they have a lawyer acquaintance of their own, a far more sympathetic character in the form of Alexis, a mature, older man who immediately senses something may be wrong and tries to do all his can to prevent the Delaneys – who have suffered loss of their own when their son died of a blood clot in his brain – from having to pay for an accident that arose from them trying to do a good deed for charity. This good lawyer/bad lawyer dynamic raised between Alexis and Cassian makes for a intriguing read, and Wickham is clever not to succumb to the much-documented cliché of depicting all lawyers as soul-sucking mercenaries. Alexis himself has a relatively engaging sub-plot involving his Summer romance with a beautiful-but-naïve local musician, Daisy, although Wickham seems unsure as to what the purpose of this little mini-romance is.

Although the novel took a while to get started, once the ball was rolling, we were into the territory that Wickham writes best – about humans, human flaws and doubts, and human interactions. Neither Louise nor Barnaby are bad people; they are, in fact, both good (only Cassian is the downright bad character in the story), but ones who have let their folly shape their paths in the past. People taking their anger out at one person by treating other’s badly is nothing new, but in Swimming Pool Sunday, Wickham allows for them to realise the error of their ways and rectify it before they make the same mistakes again. A satisfyingly deep read.

Ha.

#1

A Look Back at Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

Thomas Hardy’s famous novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles was not a universal hit when it was first published in 1891, and met more than its fair share of controversy. Society at that time, it seemed, were not particularly receptive a novel that sympathised with women, that sympathised with the lower class, or was willing to challenge the social and sexual codes of the time. Over 100 years on, society is a lot more accepting to the ideas raised in his novel, and, just before the release of the next Bond film, the BBC have found the perfect time to re-invigorate Hardy’s novel onto the small screen.

22-year-old Kent-born English rose Gemma Aterton, who appears in three 2008 releases – RocknRolla, Three and Out, and Quantum of Solace, plays the low-born but beautiful country girl Tess who catches the eye of the immoral Alec D'Urberville, who, after persist and failed attempts to win her heart, takes advantage of her tired state one night, leaving her wounded and broken, but also leaving her a mother, to a stillborn baby. Things get better for Tess when she meets her supposed soulmate in Angel Clare, who falls for her too (and this time, the love is requited), but her shady past (to no fault of her own) continues to catch up with her, and finally, her honest soul lets her down when she admits to her newfound husband about her past endeavours, and he hypocritically rejects her.

Having had read the novel, I knew how the story went, but that didn’t stop me from feeling for Tess as strongly as I did the first time I read the novel. In their adaptation, the BBC choose not to blur the line between whether or not it was seduction or rape – they depict the event as rape (which is also how I interpret it). Tess’ subsequent downfall is heartbreaking, not least because of the raw, gut-wrenching performance from Gemma Aterton, who, accent aside, captures all the qualities of Tess Durbyfield – kind-hearted, sincere, loyal, naïve, and prokects them into a brilliant performance. Her final scenes with Alec, in particular, broke my heart.

Overall, despite a few drawbacks, I found Tess and beautiful and moving adaptation of Hardy’s novel, and I look forward to seeing more of Miss Aterton!

So, for those of you who watched this, what did you make of it?

Four brief book reviews.

I’ve been a bit behind on the whole “a book a day” thing, as well as reviewing them for the blog. But anyway, here’s four books I read this week:

Memories of My Melancholy Whores (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
Underwhelming, to say the least. It was turgid, dull and extreeeeeeemely unsexy (I don’t want to hear about a 90-year-old man’s waning libido, cheers). Marquez, you can and have done so much better.

Dumb Witness (Agatha Christie)
One of my favourite Agatha Christie mysteries. Not quite up there with The ABC Murders and And Then There Were None, but certainly one of her finest, in terms of plot, character development, and narration. The idea - of Poirot investigating the murder of a woman who sent him a letter long before she died - is ingenious, and there are various twists and turns throughout.

Star Struck (Val McDermid)
Emma 4-xing loves this book!!! After I ploughed through my own “script” of Butterfly, I thought the two words “crime comedy” would instil nothing but a shudder in me. I was wrong, for Star Struck has got crime and humour in spades. It’s about Kate Brannigan, a P.I. in Manchester who has been hired to be the bodyguard of famous TV star Gloria Kendel, who has been getting death threats. But once she takes on the job, it's more than just scary letters that she has to contend with as a celebrity mystic-meg type gets murdered. 

The book encapsulates all of Kate’s life, from her employees who are getting arrested or hooking up in cyberspace, to her brooding boyfriend, to all the eccentric people she meets on the job. Kate Brannigan is an amazing role model. Honestly, with the influx of wags and empty-headed glamour models that we're seeing in the Media, reading about Kate, with her Thai-boxing, Chinese food eating, fast-talking ways was an absolute breath of fresh air. 

Star Struck is very clever, well-written and insightful, it played a bit like an episode of Jonathan Creek as written by Sophie Kinsella. I absolutely adored it. (And I've just found out that there are about 5 more Kate Brannigan books written! *is happy*)

The Lady and the Unicorn (Tracy Chevalier)
If anyone can make the process of painting and creating and weaving a tapestry interesting to a complete art-phobic like me, it’s Tracy Chevalier. 

Girl with a Pearl Earring was one of the most beautiful and underratedly sexy books I’ve ever read. TLATU is a little less subtle in its characters’ carnal desires, and I for one couldn’t see what all the women in the book saw in Nicholas (who didn’t sound that fit, imo) and why they were willing to run the risk of getting pregnant by him. 

That said, the narration, which jumps from character to character, is really well done – their inner monologues are completely believable and it’s refreshing to hear a story from different angles. And a tapestry of a unicorn sounds sublime.

The Tesseract (Alex Garland)

Thank the lord for audiobooks. If it wasn’t for Martyn Reed’s voice reading me Alex Garland’s second book, The Tesseract, I would have died of boredom this past two days tidying my bedroom. As it was, with the convoluted plot being read to me whilst I did my summer cleaning, it was actually a pleasant experience.

I’ve not read Alex Garland’s debut, The Beach, but I’ve seen the film version of it, and, whilst I loved all the shots of Leonardo DiCaprio with his shirt off, I thought the film itself was ploddy and at parts, unintentionally hilarious. That said, it was still fairly thrilling, and thrill is something that The Tesseract offered from the start to finish.

Told in four parts, The Tesseract begins with Sean, a sailor on the shipping waters of Manila, waiting in a run-down motel for the gangster, Don Pepe to pay him a visit. Next, the story shifts to a doctor, Rosa, who is waiting for her husband Sonny to come home, as she reminisces about her first love, Lito. The next story follows two young Filipino hustlers, Vincente and Totoy, as they wander the streets of Manila in search of some easy dosh. And then there’s the finally, so climactic, so wonderfully clever in weaving the three threads together, that it makes Magnolia look like Little Britain.

The ambitious plot device made The Tesseract are hard story to write, but Garland completely succeeds. His modulates tone perfectly; from the nervous panic in Sean’s strand, to the romantic and bittersweet telling of Rosa’s romance of Lito, to the philosophical musings of Alfredo, a psychologist who Vincente and Totoy go to to sell their dreams to. At times, the pseudo-science gets a bit grating, and the flashback-within-flashback strategy left me a bit confused. I liked the novel most when it played things simple; and my favourite plot of the three was by far Rosa's, the tale of her and Lito was handled very beautifully.

Towards the end, Garland ran the serious risk of running himself off at a tangent, but luckily, he kept the story in control. The finale is as interesting as it is satisfying, tying in all three plot strands with one denouement, like the converging Tesseract of the title.

Oh, and the book was read aloud by Martyn Reed, who has a lovely voice; very deep and enigmatic.

Sweet (Julie Burchill)

I haven’t read the first Julie Burchill novel for teenagers, Sugar Rush, for which this is the sequel to, nor have I seen the TV programme of it, but I found this book on the ground when walking home yesterday (yep, really!) and the garish pink cover made me stop, read the blurb, and decide that on this occasion, it was finder’s, keeper’s.

Sweet tells the story of Maria “Sugar” Sweet, who has just been released from prison for grievous bodily harm. At 17, she’s already married and got a daughter – both of whom aren’t there when she’s released. Yet Maria is more pissed off about the fact that her husband ran off with her iPod than her daughter. Nice.

Anyway, the novel follows Sugar as she tries everything she can do get out of Brighton. Her first job is doing cleaning up for a pair of gay fashion designers, who decide to use her as their muse for their latest “product” (it later turns out that product is a range of clothes inspired by chavs.)

Sugar is a larger-than-life character, completely sure of her Goddessness and more than a bit of a slut, jumping from one guy to the next. Although she thinks she might be lesbian (there are frequent references to Kim, the girl who loved her, and Sugar didn’t realise she loved until it was too late), that doesn’t stop her from bedding her workmate Asif, making plans to shag a Chinese doctor she liked the look of, as well as snogging the face off anyone she meets.

I found it very hard to like Sugar, who is one of the most selfish, mercenary and insensitive people I’ve ever read about. Yet, I was totally drawn into her world (probably because it’s so different from mine.) She comes out with some of the most shocking and crass things – such as asking her 35-year-old pregnant mother, who wants her baby terminated, if she’d like to be pushed down the stairs to save money on an abortion, as well as referring to gays and lesbians in the widest range of derogatory terms I’ve ever heard. Plus, remember, she’s a mother. And she doesn’t care.

But I couldn’t help it, I felt myself giggling wickedly at everything Sugar said, and even empathising with her occasionally. Julie Burchill writes in the most colloquial way, but she does it so well and the book feels more like a chat with Sugar than anything else. Plus, the ghost of Kim hangs about through the entire novel, and you can feel Sugar letting her guard down about her one true love, who she’d (I’m guessing) manipulated and bullied in the first novel, only to regret it when it was too late. There was one passage in the novel where Sugar was remembering all the good times with Kim, and lamenting her loss, and that was Burchill’s way of showing that the cold bitch does have a heart after all.

Riotously good fun, shocking, rude, vulgar, unrealistic, yet utterly compelling, I was completely won over by “Sweet”, and will now be backtracking to read “Sugar Rush.”

Book review: THE WASP FACTORY (Iain Banks)

The Wasp Factory follows life of 16-year-old Frank, a truly sadistic and disturbed kid who likes to torture animals and has to date, killed three people (all children that are related to them), lives with their dad, whose brother Eric has just escaped from a sanitarium.

When I was recommended this book, I was told that there was going to be a twist, so, all the way through, I was trying to guess it. I thought that the twist was going to be that Frank never killed those three people. Whilst that could be true (we only have his word to go by, after all), the twist is even more audacious and much more original than that, and it was doubly ironic considering how Frank spent a lot of the novel going on about how much he hated [them]. I was a bit bemused by it.

The book itself is like watching a catfight; not pretty, but impossible to draw your eyes away. The imagery of how he tortured the rabbits was disgusting, but the bit that practically had me reaching for the sick bucket was when Frank described the ordeal that his brother went through when tending to a baby at the hospital. It. Was. Horrible.

Although The Wasp Factory never quite reaches the levels of gleeful sadism that I dreaded, due to me having high expectations for the wickedness, I was still thoroughly disturbed and shocked by it. 

Frank is one of the most macabre yet interesting literary characters I’ve read about (he sees death as natural and feels no qualms about killing, yet felt compelled to kill his cousin to balance out the numbers in terms of gender), Banks creates him excellently and builds their world and their mindset. It’s an unpleasant book and thus unlikely to make it on my list of favourites, but it’s a fine Gothic tale that receives my recommendation – if you can brave it.

Fireworks at Lake Michigan.

Three books today, two novellas and a longer book.

The two novellas were:

Kill Swap (James Lovegrove)

Despite being only about 60 pages in length, I really got a lot out of this book. It started with what seemed to be a Strangers on a Train-type plot – a boy, whose dad is being hounded by an uncompromising loan shark, agrees to kill a banker in the city he doesn’t know in return for the loan shark getting killed by someone else. But then the twists kick in. 

The problem with the short length of the novel is that we don’t really get given time to feel for the lad at the centre of it all – we get that he feels guilty, but he literally dwells over it for about three lines. That said, I really enjoyed it and thought it was very clever, particularly the nice bit of revenge at the end.

Fame Thing (Jonathan Meres)

This is about a football-mad teenage girl, George, who befriends the footballer that has just moved into her town, despite everyone else thinking he’s “bad news.” Completely unrealistic and predictable from start to finish (George is in a wheelchair, and as soon as the footballer’s agent sees her init's clear that he wants to get the two together cos it’s good PR), though it had some nice domestic scenes between George and her brother, as well as George and her best friend Nick. 

Overall though, I think the book couldn’t decide what it wanted to be – a comment on the state of the media (which Kill Swap did terrifically), the story of a teenage girl getting hormones, or a warning about the dangers of being too successful too quickly. In the end, it didn’t achieve any of those things.

And the book I read was:

The Mathematics of Love (Emma Darwin)

Reading this is becoming somewhat of a Summertime ritual now, though at times, it’s anything but a sunny read. The Mathematics of Love follows Stephen Fairhust, a Major returned from the brutality of Wellington's Peninsular War and Anna Ware, a 15 year old girl whose been fobbed off by her irresponsible mother, forced to live with her uncle and drunken grandmother in a dilapidated ex-school. Both experience love, though it’s far from without it’s tribulations. Stephen writes letters to Miss Durward, and, 150 years later, these letters are read by Anna, linking our two protagonists together.

Although it does take some getting into and not much seems to occur at first, every line was beautifully formed. I definitely preferred Stephen to Anna; some petulant streaks to Anna’s personality rendered her very dislikeable to me to begin with, but towards the end, I grew to respect her. I thought the way Darwin presented the relationship Anna pursued with an older man, photographer Theo, as well as the third person in their relationship Eva, was terrific, so, for that, I kind of preferred the modern strand more. Ooh, and I cried for poor Cecil. :( 

Overall, I really, really enjoyed this book.

A Book A Day...

The Lovely Bones.

I was so busy celebrating the end of the exams that I nearly forgot to read, which would have been quite a crap way to start the “A book a day” campaign!

Anyway. Today, I opted for a book I’ve read before and didn’t love – critical darling The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold - to see whether my opinion of it would change in time for the 2009 release of the Peter Jackson directed film.

Right, well, where to start? Loved the cover picture, of the charm bracelet, hated just about everything else. The premise was fairly OK – dead girl caught in limbo between earth and heaven and looking down, but the execution just didn’t carry off. I didn’t like the detached writing style (though I do think it suited the novel), I wasn’t able to sympathise for any of the characters (I wasn’t convinced by some of the character’s “grief” – a mother that cheats following her daughter’s death is a little too pat, imo), and most of all, I got a really horrible feeling that Sebold took a grim sort of pleasure in describing Susie’s rape and murder, as well all of the other murder victims. She just kept going into all the detail, whilst trying to write in this classy way. Eww. Some critics said it was beautiful and uplifting, and whilst I wasn’t depressed by it or anything, it was definitely anything but beautiful. Rather, I thought it was kinda self-indulgent and turgid. Overall, I just thought it was a bit of a waste of time.

Saoirse Ronan says she hasn’t read the book yet. Let’s hope it stays that way.

The verdict:

^^ that was a naff review, I know, but I really do feel it was quite a naff book. I was “meh” following my first reading of it, but now I really dislike it.