Book Orgy

Due to my currently unemployed status I am really eating up books at the moment. I don't know if others go through this phase but its one that involves library-borrowing, ferreting through the family/sharehouse bookshelf, and even committing the cardinal sin of getting stuck into a book that someone else is partway through. The shame. So here's a condensed run-down for you nerdygrrls (and boys), if you want some pointers in the direction of diversionary reading. Oh by the way, this run-down is from the start of April, so not as bad as it looks.

Animal Instincts - Barbara Kingsolver
About a young woman returning to her tiny childhood town near the USA- Mexico border, with lots of latino culture surviving. The stories from her young life unfold into her experience there as an adult, and teaching biology at the high school. Liked this. She's tall, a bit awkward, a bit of a stewer, and it has some family stories, love, a glimpse into indigenous life, and a sprinkling of ecology.

The Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood
Love the Margie A. She creates lovely women characters who are flawed but funny, and strong, and believable. She basically re-tells sections of this story as experienced by 3 different women. They have a common link of their experience with a psycho, life wrecking monster. For a while I couldn't work out the point of painting this one-woman car crash, but at the very least its entertaining.

Choke - Chuck Palahniuk
Hilarous. Lots of compulsive sex, including a treatise on the various airline toilet capacities on cross-continental flights. Made all the more richer by the discovery last night that a compatriot has had a real experience of this nature. I also think that there's a couple writers like Chuck (Irving Welsh comes to mind) who are creating shocking/dirty/reprehensible scenes to make a point or draw a metaphor on the rampant use-and-abuse nature of society. They just exaggerate it so far out there into the world of toilet sex so us readers don't recognise ourselves (at first).

The Wind-up Bird Chronicles - Haruki Murikama
I really didn't get along with this book. Feel a bit of a cheat as I gave a copy to Miss J. Whoops. I persevered through several full days on the couch reading it, only to feel very empty and flat, as that was precisely what the main character was doing. When he wasn't navigating a pyscho-drama that involved endless walking down passages (real or imagined) fights with a baseball bat, intense stories from the war, and a long, seemingly pointless episode with a duo of pyschic sisters. I feel bad being mean about it, and maybe I just couldn't piece the puzzle together, needing more pedestrian and linear plots. I really hope others can get into it, and enjoy the intense mystery and interior life that he opens up in incredible detail.

Fairy-tale anthology - Compiled by Angela Carter
My lovely birthday pressie by the very perceptive and thoughtful miss J, and also resting at her hillside abode, as it was too heavy to add to my bursting backpack. A great one to dip into, and savour and laugh over ancient tales of tricky women. Will have a nice long shelf life I'm sure. Would be grand to read aloud sections to munchkins.

Star Dust - Neil Gaiman
In the modern Fairy-tale genre. Great fun. Takes only an afternoon. Set in a Victorian-era village that contains the frontier into "Fairy" - the land beyond the wall. Currently being turned into a movie with Robert DeNiro, Michelle Pfieffer and Clare Danes.

Strange Pilgrims - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Short stories all about Latin Americans in Europe. Some a bit fanstastical, many with a spoonfull of sadness or grief. Rewarding to read references to places and respond with a slightly smug mental "I've been there, I know what seaside boulevard he's talking about".

Tremble - Toshiba Learner
Australia's no. 1 mainstream erotic writer, with a speciality in creating a historic setting. Short stories, with a bit of rumpy pumpy in all of them. Some grotesque. I haven't finished them all, but a couple of stand-outs that made me laugh out loud. In particular the Brisbane white-shoe property developer being "haunted" by the jungle that his concrete monstrosities gobble up. All his sexual fantasies feature synthetic materials, and a kind of weird plastic film. He is repulsed by the organic, the dirty, the natural, but then he meets a grand, feral ecologist with no bra and hairy-armpits. You can imagine where it goes, the whole thing a serious piss-take.

The Red Tent - Anita Daimant
Tale of the tribe of "Jacobites" - Jacob from the (first) Bible - his four wives, 11 sons, and one daughter, told from the daughter's perspective. Lots of pregnancies, old rituals, births, deaths, eygptians, and old-testament-style violence. Quite famous as far as I can tell.

Affluenza - Clive Hamilton
Read it. Its scary. Aussie stats and tales about the national obession with possesion, coupled with a uniquely Australian malaise where the collective subconsiousness is kidding itself we are all still "doing it tough".

Mr Nice - Howard Marks
Life story of a hippy traveller who became an international dealer exclusively in marijuana. Somewhat a celebrity in the UK. Full of hundreds of names, funny-clever international deals, unpleasant consequences and horror of the US "justice" system.