The Complete Fairy Tales of The Brothers Grimm, by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
One more for the year.
What impressed me most about this book was the complete and utter lack of a moral message in these tales. I think that the only things children would learn from reading these are that ugly people are evil; it’s mostly better to be stupid instead of clever, and Jews are lying misers.
Lessons for the ages…
Dark Entries by Ian Rankin
In the immediate past I accused the recent Hellblazer comic Scab of being a paint-by-numbers affair. Dark Entries, which sees John Constantine investigating a haunted-house themed reality show, has exactly the same numbers drawn on the canvas: Threat from Constantine’s dodgy past; unsubtle social commentary; awkward balance between Constantine being a dick and being scared and vulnerable. All there. That having been said, this story fares better than the last. It probably won’t win a Pulitzer and it was more than a little predictable, but it killed an hour quite nicely and counts as a solid Constatine story.
Right, that’s me done. I’ve just picked up a 1000 page book that I don’t anticipate finishing in the next ten or so days, so the experiment of writing about things is over. I might carry it on next year, I’m not sure. On the one hand, I’m quite lazy, and would hate this to become a chore; on the other, after this year, which has consisted almost entirely of comics and young adult bollocks, I sort of want to spend a year proving that I read growed-up books for adults.
We’ll see…
The Reluctant Fathers’ Club by Nick Duerden
Nick Deurden is in his mid-thirties and has been with his girlfriend for eleven years when she decides she wants a baby. Duerden, who doesn’t, goes along with the plan for the sake of not starting a fight, but is completely unprepared for the whole process.
Nine difficult and annoying months later, his daughter is born; a daughter with whom he feels almost no connection; a child he resents for the change it has wrought in his heretofore peaceable life.
This was an interesting book. Duerden himself points out that he didn’t experience anything more severe than many men. The feeling of unpreparedness; the twin resentments of having to spend so much time looking after a child while at the same time having everyone from ones partner to society at large assume that as a man you’ll mess it up; the fact that it’s hard to relate to someone before they can express emotion verbally or visually despite all of the movies and tv shows telling you otherwise… Duerden is not writing about an extraordinary situation, rather an everyday one that too few people have explored in detail.
Probably not of interest to the layperson, but I know a lot of people who have had or are having kids, and the men involved could do worse than reading this…
The Gnostic Gospels by various
The Bible, only for hippies.
Honestly, I didn’t see why people make such a big deal about this one. The hippy bits were too hippy to be properly Christian and the Christian bits were too Christian to be properly hippy. I used to hang out with a pack of hippy-Christians who this might have appealed to, but since I had my Damascus moment and realised that you can’t believe in peace, love and the Old-Testament God all at the same time, things that try to mix Christianity with, say goddess-worship have just struck me as slightly silly and pointless.
I understand why some people might like this, but overall it really didn’t do anything for me.
Dear Me edited by Joseph Galliano
Letters by British celebrities to their sixteen-year-old selves giving words of wisdom, advice and encouragement.
This was a very mixed bag. A lot of the contributions consisted of scrawled notes reading in their entirety “buck up, it’ll all turn out okay”. The longer, more thought-out efforts were more interesting, although they did get a bit samey after a while.
There were some gems: Danny Wallace’s and Jon Ronson’s were great, but I suppose I’m already a fan of their respective works. Far and away the best was Stephen Fry’s contribution, readable here.
This is a nice little book to dip in and out of, but probably not worth paying full price for. I highly recommend you read Fry’s letter in the link above, but other than that, well, maybe if you see the book on special for five bucks…
Scab by Peter Milligan
Another John Constantine comic, wherein Constantine is afflicted with a hideous skin deformity as a result of past sins, which is disappointingly soulless. I’m a big fan of Peter Milligan’s work, but, for the first story in this collection it was like he had checklist of what should go into an issue of Hellblazer: Threat from Constantine’s dodgy past? Check. Grotesquely unsubtle parable for socialism? Check. Awkward balance between Constantine being a dick and being scared and vulnerable? Check. This story has everything that one would expect, but it is like Milligan was making sure the elements were all there, building from a kitset, and the result is a story that failed to engage at any level.
The next story, wherein Constantine deals with a haunting on the site of a former plague-pit, fires a bit more and reads less like a paint-by-numbers story but overall, after the brilliant Hellblazer stuff that has been coming out over the last few years, this was disappointing.
(Off to Australia tomorrow where, as I understand it, they don’t have the internet, so I’ll throw up the three or four remaining things I’ve read over the course of today. If I can be bothered writing them…)
The Umbrella Academy: The Apocalypse Suite and Dallas by Gerard Way
These two comics/graphic novels, written by the lead singer of My Chemical Romance, follow the exploits of the Umbrella Academy – seven (mostly) weird individuals raised from infancy by an inhuman professor who trained them to save the world.
This is great. It is fast-paced, frighteningly peculiar, and filled with pathos despite the fact that it never takes itself too seriously. It is, in short, exactly what comics should be. I read a fair amount of comics but very few of them have the sense of fun possessed by The Umbrella Academy.
Not for fans of subtlety or, say, narrative structure, but if you want an hour or two of sheer fun, this is the place to look.
My Chemical Romance is still arse, though. I don’t get why Gerard Way devotes so much of his time to making awful, awful music, and so little time to making such brilliant comics. Life’s just not fair, I suppose…
Charles Manson Coming Down Fast by Simon Wells
An interesting and absorbing look into the life and times of Charles Manson. Wells says his intent was to write a history of Manson and the Family that was “less hysterical” than previous accounts. Having not read any other in-depth accounts, I can’t comment on the success or otherwise of this ambition, but it was a well-researched tome with a great deal of information. Engaging and well-written (with the odd glaring phrase or two) this was an informative read, and one I recommend.
Ganglands: Brazil by Ross Kemp
Luiz grew up around the gangs in Rio De Janeiro. He left that life behind years ago, but now, to save his sister he must return to the slums and infiltrate one of Brazil’s most dangerous gangs.
Basically what Ross Kemp has done here is take everything he learned making one episode/chapter of his show/book Gangs and mcguffined a fictional character into it. (The second book in the series – about another gang Kemp investigated for his series – comes out next year.)
This was quite good. Nothing that flash, and entirely redundant if you’ve read the non-fiction version, but Kemp wrote this in large part for reluctant readers of the teenaged male variety, and I think it would be great for them.
The memoir of former Mongrel Mob president: his youth, his time in the gang and his eventual journey out of that life.
This was a fascinating look into the mind of a mobster. Isaac explains his mindset and while he does not present himself as a sympathetic figure, he is an understandable one; he does not try to make excuses for his behaviour, but there are reasons for it and he presents the choices he made and the thought (or lack thereof) behind them.
My one caveat for this book is that it isn’t very well written. While that sort of thing would usually bother me, I liked that we got the story from the mouth of the man who lived it – second had accounts are more than fine, and often serve to make an otherwise lifeless or muddled account readable, but there’s a niceness to having it direct from the source. (That having been said, this seems to have had a ghost writer, so hell if I know how that guy earned his money…)
Not the easiest book in the world to find a copy of, but worth the effort.
