A Great Book, A Cold Weekend And A New Car

I wrote the other week that, now that the house project is finished, I would have to find something else to write about. Unfortunately life has been too hectic to write a great deal lately and things are looking pretty busy for the next few weeks too.

A good deal of the last week was spent reading the 2001 Pullitzer Prize winning novel The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon. It's not a book that I would have noticed but Scott Pack (see Meandmybigmouth in the blog list over on the right) suggested it as one of his occasional social reading events and a number of his blog readers read it over the past few weeks and then discussed it online. It is about a couple of Jewish cousins - Sammy a New Yorker and Joseph a Czech emigrant escaping the Nazis - who get together and write comic books.  Their superhero character The Escapist based upon a mixture of their childhood backgrounds is their route to success. It's a tremendous book and I strongly recommend that you give it a try.

As for life here in Suffolk, we finally managed to open the bi-folding doors for the very first time on Friday afternoon as the sun beat down to line us up for a glorious weekend.

Unfortunately that glorious weekend did not materialise and on Saturday when we went to the village fete in nearby Kettleburgh we found ourselves shivering and the first thing we did when we got back was switch the central heating on. And it's been on again two or three time since - not exactly blazing June.

Today we went to NEXT in Martlesham to get a few plants for the garden pots. Here's a new one on me, the Flowering "Current".

After that we drove to the Mercedes garage in Bury St Edmunds to test drive a new car. I phoned the Ipswich dealership last Tuesday but they didn't seem very interested in my enquiry about a special deal that Mercedes had on for June only. They phoned me back the following day only after I had to phone them to ask if they had forgotten me and then they quoted for a car with a different spec to the one I enquired about. Feeling that they weren't exactly in a hurry to sell me a car, I tried the Bury St Edmunds dealership. They came up with a car to exactly the spec that I asked for and phoned me back less than thirty minutes later. Ipswich phoned again late on Friday with details of another car that was one of the colours that I had ruled out. The test drive went well and in a couple of weeks I should take delivery of a shiny new motor. I'm not very well up on cars and all the stuff about engine sizes, 0-60 in so many seconds and bhp goes straight over my head but I do know when I like what a vehicle looks like and we've gone for this purely on its style - it's lovely to look at and very comfortable too which will make all those thousand mile round trips to St Andrews and the two hundred mile round trips to Rochester a bit more enjoyable.

It's a bit of a change from the eco friendly Prius (which we're keeping for a runaround) but its mpg is not a lot lower and when you take into account the carbon footprint of building the Prius and shipping it from Japan, there's not that much difference (at least that's what i'm telling myself).

Perfect Weather...................For Reading

With the weather here at the caravan in St Andrews no different to how it was when we were here in January there was no chance of getting on the bike today. I'm not a fair weather cyclist (honestly) but when the wind is strong enough to keep Sir Bradley Wiggins at a standstill and it's so cold that the central heating is on at full blast, it's time to leave the bicycle in its locker.

I had a good day - lunch at Zizzis in town with Sarah, Duncan and Rose followed by a trip to the supermarket and an hour or so babysitting. But after dropping Rose back home and with the hurricane force winds eliminating any thoughts of getting out with the metal detector I decided to head back to the caravan and read.

We loaded the Kindles up a week or so ago so I had a good look through what we had downloaded. I found one called Crooked Letter Crooked Letter which I think Marion must have bought after it got good reviews in The Guardian.

Although I suppose that you could describe it as a thriller (which is not my usual cup of tea), the blood and gore were left to the reader's imagination leaving us with an intriguing story of two Mississippi boys one black, one white, one cool, one not, whose lives are inextricably linked. The novel jumps between their 80's childhood and the present where one is now a cop seeking a missing girl, the other a vilified loner who everybody thinks is linked to her abduction. Tom Franklin creates a vivid and atmospheric evocation of life in the backwoods and swamplands around the small town of Chabot with well drawn characters you can see and dialogue you can hear. I read the book in no time and felt like I had just watched a very good film. Great stuff.

I'm glad that I managed to finish it quickly as Scott Pack (blogger meandmybigmouth who is linked over there on the right on my blog list) is doing another of his periodic online book clubs next week. This time it's The Amazing Adventures Of  Kavalier And Clay and I'm really looking forward to reading this as it looks very different and entertaining. I hope it is as I am regularly disappointed in trying to find entertaining books. I'm doubly pleased that this was chosen as Scott had put it to a vote and it was neck and neck with current bestseller Gone Girl which both Marion and I read recently. We both wondered what all the fuss was about. Marion hated it and I thought it was so-so although we both agreed that it is a page turner albeit one with a big disappointment at the end. 

In an attempt to read something entertaining, I read Oh Dear Sylvia by Dawn French a few weeks ago and, although it is readable, I was expecting something funny from such a great comedienne. It didn't raise as much as a smile I'm afraid. If anyone can recommend something to make me laugh I would love to hear from them.

On Looper And A Couple Of Recent Reads

Following our long walk around Loch Leven on Wednesday we did indeed sleep well and our bones were aching as we rose in the morning to head to Edinburgh for the day. We had a few presents to buy and we needed to get some bits and pieces to finish off the bathrooms in Framlingham (toilet roll holders, towel rings – you know the sort of thing).

We always enjoy our visits to Edinburgh. It’s the perfect sized city; everything is within fairly easy walking distance but there’s loads to do - good shops, museums, restaurants and galleries and much more. We went into Harvey Nicholls to look for a present. It’s a super shop and it would be easy to spend hours browsing in there. We just bought the present and enjoyed a cup of coffee but we’ll make sure that we have plenty of time next time we visit.

We debated which film to see with the last few pounds remaining on our VUE gift card that we got for Christmas but hadn’t spent due to the lack of VUE cinemas near St Andrews and Framlingham. It was a toss up between The Perks Of Being A Wallflower and Looper. Each scored about the same on the IMDB website but Looper came out slightly on top with the critics.

It’s one of those films that creates a grim, dystopian view of a future where half the population appears to be living in abject, lawless, poverty while the remainder is involved in a hedonistic, drug fuelled life of relative luxury. This future is 2044, only just over thirty years away so I hope that it’s way off the mark as I wouldn’t want our grandchildren living in it. It seems that thirty years ahead of that it will be impossible to dispose of a body without being caught so the criminal mob, who by then have mastered time travel, send their victims back thirty years where they are unceremoniously disposed of by hit-men known as loopers.

It’s a complex but interesting idea, which becomes even more complicated when the time traveller turns out to be an older version of the assassin himself and sees Joe ( Joseph Gordon-Levitt) sitting down to steak in a diner with his older self (Bruce Willis). Throw in a kid who is a sort of six year old medium with one hell of a temper and his sexy mum to create a love interest and you’ve got a plot that doesn’t make a lot of sense but is nonetheless an entertaining couple of hours with plenty of action.

I enjoyed seeing what happened to one of the loopers who travelled back and escaped his younger self. The mob exact violent revenge on his 2044 version but we don’t witness the violence and instead watch the older man metamorphise before us – a clever idea. The romances between the lead character Joe in both 2044 and in the future are unconvincing but they aren’t central to the film, which is essentially a sci-fi shoot em up,  and I’ll forgive them.

I haven’t written about what I’ve been reading lately. The WIFI here at the caravan is so poor that I struggle to upload the blog but I’ve enjoyed Caroline Flett’s Separate Lives, Meg Rosoff’s What I Was and  I also read Summer’s Lease by Charles Mortimer which is entertaining but very dated just thirty years after it was first published. I am currently reading The Quincunx by Charles Palliser as part of Scott Pack’s internet social reading group – see the link to Meandmybigmouth blog over to the right. This is a monster of a book at over 1200 pages and not something that I would have normally picked up. However, it’s surprisingly good so far and not at all what I expected – and owes more to Charles Dickens than any 21^st century writer. I’ll let you know what I think after then next 900 pages.

It's a quiet week this week with no trips to Sufoflk planned so I hope we can get to a couple of films in Dundee, take granddaughter Rose and daughter Sarah to Edinburgh and also have a day out with the detector. After that we're really excited about seeing the progress on the house in Framlingham on 24th October and even more excited about seeing this little lady again on  25th. She'll be almost three months old.

Oh Happy Days. Some Funny Books At Last.

A fellow blogger and metal detecting enthusiast John Winter (you can find his excellent blog down there on the right) asked me the other day if I read mostly female authors. I can understand him thinking this as I've recently reviewed books by Caroline Smailes, Ann Weisberger, Nicola May,Talli Roland, Meg Rosoff and Rachel Joyce on this blog. But in the last twelve months my favourite books have also included Pigeon English, The White Tiger, We The Drowned, Florence And Giles and Homer And Langley all of which were written by men. And by pure coincidence, both the novels I read this week have male authors.

I've grumbled so often about the lack of funny books that I started to wonder if I had lost my sense of humour. All the "I nearly wet myself ", "tears were streaming down my face" and "I almost died laughing" quotes on the fronts and backs of novels might muster a glimmer of a smile at best. There's one author on Twitter who, almost every day, quotes that a famous comic found his book hilarious - it's a pleasant enough read but he got me to buy it under false pretences. 


Well, finally, here's one that does exactly what it says on the tin (that would get the narrator's back up).


Driving Jarvis Ham by Jim Bob opens with "Would you drink a pint of your own piss?", a brilliant line but one that might deter the more sensitive reader. But, sensitive reader - any reader,  I urge you to proceed beyond this and the increasingly gross challenges that Jarvis and our narrator are discussing in one of their "in car" games and enjoy an extremely funny tale of a childhood friendship that came about one day at school and continued for the next thirty years. Jarvis is a Princess Diana obsessive, wannabe actor, wannabe pop star, wannabe anything famous. He's got none of the attributes that might give him even a smidgeon of a chance to realise those dreams - his classmates called him "balloon head", he can't sing and he can't act but somehow, our narrator, his only friend, sticks with him and indulges him with lifts to his no hope auditions and am-dram flops. 


Something more sinister lurks beneath Jarvis' loser existence as the novel develops through a clever combination of diaries and other mementos some discovered by his friend, some written by him. I love the friendly narrative conversational style. There are also some brilliant illustrations that alone would justify a "laugh out loud" quote on the back (although there are more than enough laughs even without them). Our narrator earns a living writing funny one-liners for Christmas crackers, fortune cookies and church posters (ruining my long held belief that the vicar at our local Methodist church must be Southport's funniest man)  and he relates the story with wonderful humour and style. Do read it - if you buy the electronic edition you even get four free songs by Jim Bob to download and enjoy. 

Having finally found one very funny book it would be too much to ask to read another in the same week wouldn't it but Michael Frayn's Skios is just that - a very funny book. Nikki is busily organising a big event for a charitable foundation on a beautiful Greek island. Fifty something Dr Norman Wilfred is flying there to make the keynote speech whilst handsome young chancer Oliver Fox is also on his way to the island to take advantage of a sexy woman in a villa he's managed to cadge for a week from friends of his wealthy not quite ex-girlfriend. All the classic characters are in place for a farce.


And what a farce develops! When Oliver discovers that his conquest has missed her plane and spots Nikki at the airport waiting for Dr Wilfred it's an opportunity he can't resist and what follows is a delightful concoction of mixed up luggage, mistaken identity and wrong bedrooms against a backdrop of sunshine, shady politicians and some other dark goings on on the hillside. It's a credit to Michael Frayn that he has managed to put together what is effectively a theatrical farce into a novel and he has pulled it off quite perfectly right down to the minor characters that no farce would be complete without - in this case brothers Spiros and Stavros from Skios Taxis and their catchphrase "thirty two euros".


So that's two very different and very funny books in a week. Whilst a lot of Driving Jarvis Ham 's humour is in the writing and Skios' laughs come from the absurd situation both are hugely enjoyable reads.


I've got The Red House by Mark Haddon (another male author please note) to read now before starting on Middlesex for Scott Pack's book club experiment later in the week (see the link to the meandmybigmouth blog over on the right)