What Do Your Books Do At Night?

I love the idea that books have a secret life at night! This video must have taken an enormous effort, but what a wonderful idea. Enjoy!

Down The Rabbit Hole By Juan Pablo Villalobos

ISBN: 978-1908276001

Published By And Other Stories

Tochtli lives with his powerful drug baron father in a luxurious and heavily guarded palace. His father is, not unreasonably, paranoid about security and so Tochtli lives in an isolated world. His view of this strange and violent world is very matter of fact. He has a disturbing understanding of how many bullets it takes to “make a corpse” depending on which body part is hit.  This knowledge combined with a child’s thought process can make uncomfortable reading. Tochtli is charming in his own way though, having his own obsessions which we all have when we are young. His include hats, samurai swords  and Liberian Pygmy Hippopotamuses.   To try and help his young son’s obvious loneliness his father takes him to Liberia to capture two of the hippos.

The story has a very claustrophobic feeling to it, and I was constantly left worrying what would happen him has he grew older. There are some similarities to Room where a young boy’s understanding of the world is distorted by his limited experience of it.  The writing is fantastic, and by inference so it the translation, at once capturing an innocence sullied by knowledge no child should ever have.

This is a great read and I can see this may well be one of the best reads of 2012.

World Book Night 2012

World Book Night is on 23rd April 2012 after a successful launch last year. The aim is to promote reading and books through recommendation. The organising commitee are looking for 25,000 volunteers, each of whom will be given 24 books to give away to people they think would benefit from them.

I heard about last year very late, so didn't apply to be a giver, but I did watch the coverage on the BBC on the night, which was very good. So, this year I have applied to give away some books, it would be lovely to be selected. I will have to think where I would give them away though. I did hear last year that some people found it hard to convince others that they were giving away free books without a catch!

The list of books is very varied, and I have read quite a few of them. Which would you go for?

The One Everyone Lies About: Reading War And Peace

ISBN: 978-0-099-51224-0

Published By Vintage

According to The Guardian, War and Peace By Leo Tolstoy is one of the books people lie about having read. I have never read War and Peace, I have never even tried, although I have never lied about reading it either. It is a book I would like to read, but the task does seem enormous, and it will displace other valuable reading time. Nevertheless, I have decided that 2012 will be the year I read this Russian classic. 

Fortunately, Tolstoy wrote short chapters, and I think a chapter a day or thereabouts will see me get through this enormous tome by the end of the year. Whether I understand any of it is an entirely separate matter. 

I get the impression that whilst the writing is fairly straightforward, no tricky olde worlde language in this one, the vast number of characters and multiple names for the same person is where the difficulty lies. 

I'll update the blog with progress reports as I go along. If anyone fancies joining me in a War-And-Peace-Read-Along, leave a comment and I'll send you the reading schedule.  

I think Jeeves would be proud of me - he does approve of an "improving book".

The Sittaford Mystery By Agatha Christie

ISBN: 978-0007354597

Published By Harper Collins

Sittaford House is in a small village of only a few houses in a remote location on the edge of Dartmoor. Cut off by snow, Mrs Willetts and her daughter who rent the house, invite their neighbours to tea.  They decide it might be fun to hold a séance. It all beings with good humour, but quickly turns more sinister when a spirit seems to tell them that Captain Trevelyan who lives in a local town has been murdered. His friend, Major Burnaby who was at the tea decides to set out to make sure his friend is OK, even though it is a six mile walk through a serious snow storm. On arriving at his friends house, he discovers the Captain has been murdered, and it happened at the exact time that the séance occurred.

The police arrest a rather stupid young man called James Pearson, the Captain’s nephew, who stands to gain from the will. James is engaged to Emily Trefusis who refuses to believe that James is guilty and with the the help of a local journalist starts to investigate herself.

I rather enjoyed the set up of the mystery, I like the idea of an “impossible” crime. In this case, how on earth did a séance manage to predict the Captain’s death? Sometimes a “how-dunnit” is more satisfying than a “who-dunnit”. It did rather loose pace towards the end, and some key clues were left right until the very last pages, so it would have been hard to solve this based on the previous chapters. Having said that, when the solution was revealed it was blindingly obvious, if only I had stopped to think about it.

In this book Christie focuses a little more on her characters, and we start to see some more emphasis placed on how people really do react to different circumstances, rather than her characters simply being tools to execute the plot. The motive of the murderer in particular shows she has started to develop her thoughts in this area.

After a few dodgy ones, it looks like Christie is back on form!