04

May

~stephen king~ carrie

CRead it in: maybe a week

This was the first Stephen King I ever read, and, in my opinion, the best one he’s ever written.  It was also the first one he ever wrote.  It’s a rare occasion that an author’s first work happens to be their best, that is, if the author continues on to write many, many works, the way that King has.

I find this book is set apart from others in King’s own horror genre for many different reasons.  First of all, you can sympathise with the monster – definitely not a normal trait in horror works, but one that is very valuable, I think.  It’s also quite sad.  Towards the end I felt very, very sorry for all characters involved, despite all their wrongdoings.

It also has its trademark scary bits – in this one, King loves his gore and death, hinting at an ability to give people very interesting, almost non-conformist deaths.  He’s creative with his death scenes, we see.

He also shows that he is a master of suspense.  From the first page I knew I had to read through the end.  Why?  Because the first page was a newspaper article about the ‘Black Prom’ and all the terrible things that occurred there, linked back to a seemingly harmless girl called Carrie White.  From there, we are recounted Carrie’s life throughout the year of the prom, but the text is always dotted with snippets of articles, eyewitness accounts, death reports and so on.  You just have to know what happens, and to know that in full detail, you have to read to the end.

At once, Carrie is normal and abnormal.  She has always been seen as abnormal by her classmates, and her home situation, the very skill that she is born with, makes her even more abnormal.  Yet we are able to follow her emotional journey up until the prom and see what experiences lay behind the choices that she makes.  This reveals her to be rather more human than we first suspect.  It’s this element of surprise that makes Carrie one of my favourite novels.

I know there’s a film coming out soon.  It’s supposed to be good – the trailer looks good – but please, please read the book first!  Nothing can top King’s incredible ability to recount the events of the Black Prom.  The images he uses are incredibly shocking and frightening not in the usual supernatural way, but in a gory, more realistic manner that makes this story remain with you for years and years (as it has for me).  Nothing can top King, not even the best acting, special effects, costumes, settings, whatever.  He is master of words in this book.

Read it if you: have always been curious about Stephen King but don’t want to scare the shit out of yourself, appreciate good horror that is not just plain old horror but so much more, like Stephen King but haven’t read this yet (how could you not have read it yet?!), enjoy reading good books, just read it.

While reading, listen to: Will You Love Me Tomorrow Lykke Li, Misery Hypnogaja (two totally different tracks for you)

11 years ago Short URL Comments

Horror/Last Name K

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23

Apr

~muriel spark~ the prime of miss jean brodie

TPOMJBRead it in: ten days

This was a book my mother picked out for me, and I very much respect her taste in books after this one.  The whole Penguin Classics thing also very much attracts me – if it has that tell-tale orange cover, I’ll buy it, especially as it’s so cheap.

This one was a winner from the beginning, because it contained those themes that I always love reading about – school life, peer groups, change and, in this case, the relationship between students and teachers.  It didn’t disappoint my expectations and I came away thankful that I had read it and somewhat in awe of the author.

This book is about the teacher Jean Brodie and her influence on her students.  Unlike most teachers, she is radical in her views, a fascist and likes teaching the girls to think for themselves and not to take everything they hear for the truth.  Although she teaches the girls much that is useful, she herself is not a good role model, and as the story continues the students tend more to do as she acts and not as she preaches.  The novel revolves around the question of who betrayed Miss Brodie, causing her to lose her job teaching at the school.

Sparks is able to capture the minds of girls in that particular age bracket where nothing is clear, and everything is experimental and new and exciting.  She is able to show these girls as forever learning, forever trying to be independent, trying to be rebellious and attempting to shape their own destinies.  Her characterisation and description skills are particularly admirable.  Although there tend to be quite a few characters to keep track of in the ‘Brodie girls’ group (I keep going to call them the Brodie bunch), we are able to distinguish each quite clearly due to Sparks’ ability to create unique characters out of an age group where everyone is usually trying to be the same.

I found this interesting in terms of power structures.  This book was almost an experiment in who had the power over whom in the complicated hierarchy that is school.  Although Miss Brodie was not as important a teacher as the principal, or perhaps some of the other teachers, her ability to capture the imagination of the girls was paramount and gave her more power.  At the same time, the principal’s attempts to find a reason to sack Miss Brodie gave each of the girls power, as they were asked to ‘dish the dirt’ on anything that might be unfavourable about their teacher’s character.  And in the end it is the student who upsets the balance, forcefully ending Miss Brodie’s ‘prime’ and changing her relationship with the Brodie girls.

Personally, I haven’t watched the movie, but I do hope to do so in the near future.  Here’s the trailer, anyway.  It might make you want to read the book more:

Read it if you: like school narratives, are interested in the mentality of teenage girls, like radical ideas, enjoy good characterisation and an interesting narrative, have watched the movie.

While reading, listen to: you’ve got to listen to the song they made especially for the movie: Jean, but apart from that… possibly some music from the period.

11 years ago Short URL Comments

Classics/Last Name S

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21

Apr

~kazuo ishiguro~ never let me go

NLMGRead it in: six days

Have to say, I saw the movie first and then read this book.  Saw this movie, in particular, because one day I got a fabulous idea for a novel where someone was born to donate their organs to science.  I thought it would be fantastic, what a great story!  Only to realise that it had already been done.  But not only that, had been done very, very well.

So the film was great, but only gave us an hour and a half’s worth of the story, while as when I finally dived into this book, I received a good two weeks’ worth.  Something about Japanese authors, I think, attracts me to them.  Even if Ishiguro was raised mostly in England, I’ve never read a half-arsed Japanese-born author.

Everything about this novel is amazing.  It has an unassuming style – first person prose, the main character telling her story as casual as conversation, yet she has a way of becoming sidetracked and recalling events of her life, which, in this haphazard manner, is how we are told her tragic but poignant story.  What the film does chronologically, the narrator does when it suits her and when the memory is relevant.

The prose is wonderful, to say the least.  It isn’t something, like that of Cormac McCarthy, that is so intricate as to distract you from the plot, but the way scenes are explained, the way you can imagine yourself in these places experiencing all these different things, is very much worth your time.

The story is tragic, very tragic, but it has an inevitability to it that distinguishes it from those Holocaust-Nazi-Germany-concentration-camp stories that are tragic in a spontaneous and sometimes almost action-packed manner.  From before halfway through this book (and from the beginning, now that I’ve revealed the spoiler) you know that these characters are all going to die.  Or you think they might find a way to escape it, but you can see in their mentality an acceptance of their inevitable premature deaths.  In this way it is tragic, and the way that the main character so readily accepts this is tragic, however it always made me feel as if I ought to spend my life doing something more worthwhile after reading this.  (Really, I know all I’m going to do is spend my life reading books like this.)

This book is incredibly thought provoking on many levels.  The issue of organ donation itself, and raising humans particularly for that purpose,  is a very ethically-complex subject.  And this book deals with that contestation as well as bringing it to the forefront of the reader’s mind.  I have also heard this book described once as part of the horror genre.  I don’t know how true this is, or what definition they were using, but it definitely is an interesting thought.  The concept itself could probably function as a horror movie with a few gory closeups and some good cinematography.  But see for yourselves.

Read it if you: enjoy a good storyline, good characters, good prose, want something incredibly poignant and thought provoking, want something that will stay with you long after you put it down, like being sad about fictional characters.

While you read it, listen to: I’ve got to recommend the film soundtrack – they did do a very good job, I think it won some sort of award – so here goes.  Never Let Me Go, The Pier, To the Cottages, The Worst Thing I Ever Did

11 years ago Short URL Comments

Last Name I/Literature

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