Back with nose in book...

Seems it has been ages since I've had the time or energy (?) to get into a book, but recently I was sick, spent a large part of a day in bed, and I have had a nose in a book of some kind ever since! Yihar! Doesn't leave me with the same feeling of wasted time that I get when I sit in front of the telly.

1) Spook Country - William Gibson
While I always find William Gibson writes well and about interesting, different subjects, this novel lost me a bit. The art scene in this novel involves geo-hacking - where people hack into coordinates on GPS's and put in things that aren't there, but if you are wearing a helmet (virtual reality style?), you can see their artwork - eg an image of River Phoenix's body lying on the spot where he actually died. This was written in his frequently used style with 3-4 converging storylines, written in turns in different chapters. There were bits where the writing just got bogged down, I felt, where the author described in detail things that I just couldn't picture, so I ended up skimming through paragraphs.
But still, Gibson's writing was noticably superior and easier to read than the book I had been reading prior to this. If you are thinking of reading a Gibson novel, I'd try "Pattern Recognition" (his last novel) instead.
3 out of 5 stars

2) Raising Boys - Steve Biddulph
While I never take these books too literally, and this has slighly dumbed-down case studies just like many self-help/pop psychology books, this book provides food for thought. Discusses stages of boyhood, importance of role models (parents or other, female or male), testosterone levels and how they fluctuate throughout childhood and its effect amongst other things. Good for helping me to think from my son's perspective, and it may just be a book I drag out again when he approaches teenagerhood...

3) Also read "T is for Trespass". Easy to read, and good to get through on a single rainy day - nuff said.

To see every bird on earth - Dan Koeppel

I guess this book is a memoir, as much as it is a novel, but it felt like reading a novel. It's subtitled 'A Father, a Son, and lifelong Obsession', where bird watching - and specifically bird listing is the obsession. At the time of writing, his father had seen over 7,000 birds. That's 7,000 species, not just 7,000 flappy squawky individuals. Seen and identified them, using all manner of field guides. Seen and identified them in all manner of hard to get to places. And then recorded them, meticulously, with cross referencing and reference to the official tally of species for a region. Changing the list as species are deemed to have been split or 'lumped' (as taxonimists decide that one species is actually two different ones that look pretty similar, or decide that two are really the one). To get this list his father dedicated huge chunks of time and attention to his pursuit, becoming more and more single minded about it as he grew older.

The story jumps from the past to the present, linking stories of Dan's grandparents' lives as they left Europe in war, and adapted to life in America, memories from his own childhood and his parent's marriage in it's early days, goes off on tangents about the history of bird watching, or of other famous listers, includes tales of adventure in far flung places as people hunt down birds to spot. And it does this all rather effortlessly, not a dry tedious detail book, but seeming rich with interesting stories that ebb and flow around each other. What I found most interesting was the author's own story of coming to terms with his father's reality, and the generous and philosophical way he looks at his dad's own childhood, and the pressures on him, and the joy and escape he got from watching birds (as well as the relentless family pressure to enter a career in medicine in give up any notion of being an ornithologist), and his conjecture that the repression ended up with the love of bird watching becoming an obsession. But he says it all so much more kindly and interestingly than I do. It was interesting to trace the author's own story of himself as a child and young man, and how his father and he interrelated, and to see that although there were periods of estrangement and hurt (when he wished his dad was different and more available to him) in the end he got to a point of trying to share their lives however they best could - which ends up with him with binaculors in the Amazon with his dad sharing the moment of him spotting his 7,000th bird.

It's quite interesting to look at the kind of behaviour in the book that is easy to say falls squarely outside the 'norm', and consider how these boundaries might gently blur - all the different kinds of tallies and lists that people make, all the different kinds of 'spotters' out there, as well as the garden variety tally-er (to-do, countries I've been to, books I've read, bands I've seen.. etc). Makes you wonder about (and the book explores this too) some general desire in humans to feel more in control through recording and counting, and maybe, in terms of bird watching, to feel connected to the wonderous abundance of nature. But maybe a little more the former than the latter.

If you like stories about people and what might or might not make them tick, tales of 'the life less travelled', how other people navigate their family dynamics, or you just want to appreciate birds just that little bit more, this one gets a double thumbs up.

Lighthousekeeping - Jeanette Winterson

"Words are the part of silence that can be spoken"

Well, I was excited a few months back to get this book from my local second book shop, one of the few of hers that I hadn't read. And I liked it. It is a fairytale of sorts, a few tales woven together - one of a young girl who is orphaned and goes to live in a lighthouse with Pew, an old blind man who can nonetheless 'see', and his ancestors, and a love and not love story of Dark, an unhappy and conflicted priest who inspires 'Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde', and also of fossils found on the cliffs of the oceanside town, which attract Darwin and his followers. It has lots of similar themes to her other works: dwells on the nature of love (Winterson is a big old softie and has great faith in romantic love as a force of transformation), identity, family ties (not the tv show), the joys of simple living, and the magical power of stories to create the world around us and the meaning the world has for us.

A passage about Dark:
"He grew to dread the hesitant tread on the stairs to his room that overlooked the sea. She carried the tray so slowly that by the time she reached his room the tea had gone cold, and every day she apologised, and every day he told her to think nothing of it, and swallowed a sip or two of the pale liquid. She was trying to economical with the tea leaves.
That morning, he lay in bed and heard the clinking of the tea cups on the tray, as she came slowly towards him. It would be porridge, he thought, heavy as a mistake, and muffins studded with raisins that accused him as he ate them. The new cook - her appointment - baked bread plain, and disapproved of 'fanciness' as she called it, though what was fancy about a raisin, he did not know."

Pew says:
"Don't regret your life, child. It will pass soon enough."

And later, the hero, grown up and in Italy:
"I unlatched the shutters. The light was as intense as a love affair. I was blinded, delighted, not just because it was warm and wonderful, but because nature measures nothing. Nobody needs this much sunlight. Nobody needs droughts, volcanoes, monsoons, tornadoes either, but we get them, because our world is as extravagant as a world can be. We are the ones obsessed with measurement. The world just pours it out."

"Up the Duff" by Kaz Cooke

An hilarious - yet informative - week by week breakdown of pregnancy. Completely lacking in assumptions about the circumstances of the reader - you could be single, married, have a same-sex partner, or whatever, and you shouldn't feel too excluded reading this book (tell me if I'm wrong here, if you have found otherwise). Not like some of the more traditional pregnancy books/mags full of pictures of hetero couples in bike pants rehearsing birthing positions as if they are on a higher plane and coping perfectly well with the totally freaky set of circumstances they find themselves in. (Despite being a hetero-married-up-the-duff woman, that is not the sort of pregnancy book I want to read).

Each week you get a run down of what is happening inside, and amusing fictional diary of a pregnant character to make you laugh, then a factual section that summarises useful info and where you can go to get more information. I got as far as week 36 before the info on giving birth, epidurals and pain was getting a bit much for me - now I'll just wait until I'm ready to read those bits - but the book has a whole lot of helpful prompts... hints that you should organise an appointment something for 4-5 weeks time, that you should think about how you feel about testing for downs syndrome etc, or that you really need to have somewhere sorted for giving birth to the baby soon.

A fun and informative read.