Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

I’m not going to provide a summary for this, because everyone knows what it’s about and it strikes me as a bit pointless to explain it to you.

This novella is almost the textbook definition of perfection, both form and content-wise. In terms of form, it packs all the information it needs into 88 pages, with vivid descriptions, all sorts of narrative devices from flashbacks to letters, all done with brilliant writing. In terms of content, it explores the inner workings of the human mind, with our wants-but-can’ts, and lays everything so bare you can see the symbolism screaming at you from the pages. But then you dig a little deeper and you start noticing a few other little million details and it’s just marvellous. 

The only qualm I have with this is that I wish I could have actually read about what Mr Hyde was up to, instead of just being told it was very, very bad.

Read from March 1st, to March 3rd, 2012.

The top two were being given away for free at my college campus, and I’m thrilled to have the first Sherlock novels so I can start reading the canon!

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

Featuring Rat, Mole, Toad and Badger, The Wind in the Willows is not unlike a series of short stories featuring animal characters in the woods of an early 20th century Britain. Each chapter features a new adventure, all very whimsical and silly and highly amusing.

This is one of those books everyone read, or was read to, as a child. I owned a simplified and illustrated copy when I was younger, which has since then been misplaced in my attic, and it was one of my favourite things ever. Reading this after about 10 or 13 years is such a nostalgia hit for me, and seeing as I’ve developed an obsession with Edwardian children’s literature as of late, it’s an added bonus. 

From what I’ve read into this book, there’s a lot of social commentary (isn’t there always?), but it wasn’t apparent to me as I was reading it, so I’ll just keep pretending this is a book about cuddly woodland creatures who drive cars and have picnics.

Read from February 19th to February 25th, 2012.

For my English Victorian Literature class.

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

My experience with fantasy novels limits itself to the Harry Potter books, the first half of Game of Thrones, the His Dark Materials series and the Chronicles of Narnia. I’m relatively familiar with the tropes, though. I know this book probably features 2000 of them, but it’s done well. It’s actually done very well.

An inkeeper who needs three days to tell his story, Kvothe is a man who is rumoured to have done many things, and to be many others. He tells his story to a man called Chronicler, starting from his childhood all through his journey to the University and how he fares there. There are mishaps and adventures and girls and then bits of magic which aren’t really magic.

One of the things that usually annoys me in fantasy books is the way the author always holds your hand and explains everything to you very neatly: there’s a nice little tablet explaining how much the coins are worth, there’s a nice teacher that teaches you all about magic and you just sit back and don’t wonder. In the Name of the Wind, nothing really gets explained. At least I didn’t feel like it. The currency just kind of shows up. The history of the country or land or kingdom or whatever this is just sort of drops in conversation and you kind of have to pick pieces here and there and glue everything together. I thought it was a very intelligent piece of work.

Kvothe is actually not completely wholesome and benevolent and a great person. He has his dark moments, moments where he’s an ass, or completely oblivious. He also matures, but also forgets, and is all-around human, even though he’s very special and talented. The setting is the usual, this medievalesque country with agrarian societies, little towns with inns and taverns. There’s lots of wine, sausages and warm bread, lutes and all those things. And I was fine with that, I knew what I was getting myself into.

My biggest, and besides some typos, only problem with this are the female characters. First off, they’re very little. There are about 3 or 4 major ones, and they’re still not very major. It’s mostly a male-dominated environment. Okay, I’m willing to accept that mostly men get to attend the University, but no other women are ever described. Not queens, not servants, not anything. It strikes me as very strange. Enter the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, who makes our protagonist go cray-cray for her, even though she’s as dull as a brick. We are told they talk for hours, but we never get to hear these conversations. All men fall for her mostly because of her looks, and not much else. She is completely one-dimensional, and like all other female characters, ends up becoming slightly imbecile as she befriends the protagonist. I found myself bored during the sections she was in, which was saddening, because she had potential in her to become so much more than a sad excuse for a plotline.

This was still very, very fun. I was completely engrossed in it, and was surprised to find that a lute-playing competition was more riveting I ever imagined it could be. Kvothe wasn’t what I like to call a Harry. He actually got things done by himself, tried very hard and occasionally made mistakes. Truly an epic, and has set some very good stones for the following two books in the trilogy.

Read from February 13th to February 19th, 2012.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

This is not a love story. I repeat, this is not a love story.

Heathcliff is not an anti-hero, he is a villain.

Catherine Earnshaw is not a fair maiden, she is a spoiled brat.

I’m not making my usual attempt at summarising this book since I feel it’s so popular, everyone knows what it’s about. Not a love story, though, and I cannot for the life of me understand how it is so heralded as such. I suppose I could say I sort of enjoyed this, but the first half of it was dull and uninteresting. It picked up the pace later towards the end due to the much more interesting main characters that took the spotlight. I can’t go in very deep with spoilers, so I’ll just say that while Heathcliff was present, all I wanted to do was fling my copy of this book against the wall. Am I missing something? I feel I do not get the appeal of this book at all. I was expecting dark moors and mist and foggy mornings and all I got was a bit of a cloudy sky. The fact that I found none of the characters remotely interesting might have contributed to my distaste for this novel as well.

I am not very good at classics because I tend to compare everything to Jane Austen and everything just ends up falling short of her work.

Read from November 22nd, 2011 to February 14th, 2012.

Some books I bought early last month I’d forgotten to show you + The Fault in our Stars.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Mitchell has described his novels as “Lego-novels”, each chapter or sentence fitting into the others to make a greater structure. Cloud Atlas is the perfect example of a giant Lego ship made up from Lego blocks from different sets and collections.

Each chapter has different characters in different time periods: an American in the Pacific Islands in the 19^th century; a young composer in Belgium in the 1930s writing letters to his lover; a female reporter investigating a scandal in Buenas Yerbas in the 70s; an editor running from mobsters in present day; a korean service robot/girl in a close future; a boy in a primeval wasteland, set in the distant future. Like nesting dolls, all these have certain interlocking elements, the littlest things that when you realize their existence make you feel very proud of yourself.

Each chapter is, deep down, a piece of genre fiction. From historical fiction to dystopian, Mitchell covers it all. It’s remarkable how he does it as if it were a completely different author. All throughout the book small, intricate details are featured, and the novel quickly achieves epic scope. It’s so good, I can’t even begin to do it justice.

As is bound to happen with these sort of books, there are always sections I enjoy more than others. For me, the middle section was very difficult to get through. It’s written in that weird accent that reminded me of southern-american speakers, and I always have a problem with reading accents in books.

The last couple of pages are amazing and beautiful, and this being my second Mitchell novel, I can safely say he has become one of my favourite authors.

Read from January 20^th to February 9^th, 2012.

Howards End by E.M. Forster

Howards End is a novel of ideas. It entertains the notion that there might be a connection between social classes and that all of them might be able to live together, even if not equally. It shows us the relationship between three different families in turn-of-the-century London: the Schlegels, who represent the bourgeoisie and intellectual elite; the Wilcoxes, the typical patriarchal family, extremely aristocratic and non-plussed by more earthly questions; and the Basts, a couple who are split between a passion for knowledge and rising up in life and simply being with the one they love.

For a novel that centers mostly around concepts and theories, the way Forster managed to weave all these concepts with a plot is masterful, and none of the sides ever gets sacrificed in spite of the other. The writing is exceptional and the way England is described is so beautiful that I forgot I’ve never been to the English countryside. Many of the criticism I’ve read online is that it’s hard to relate to this book because it is so English and not universal enough. Maybe that is what appeals to me in it, but I don’t think that its Britishness is a bad thing. And what is more universal than the struggle between wealth and poverty, power and uselessness?

My favourite characters were Margaret, whom I related a great deal to, and I had a special fondness for Leonard Bast, with his dreams and silent wishes of grandeur; of course, Howards End, which is a character all of its own. I saw a great deal of Byatt’s The Children’s Book in this book, and now realize it was the other way around. The house is not merely the stage, but the actions and people all at once, much like Byatt’s novel.

A terrific book, laced with precious snippets of phrases and words that made me smile in appreciation and also made me wonder about how status and intelligence was and is now perceived. Besides from being an amazingly written book with an interesting storyline, it was written before the great wars, showcasing the tensions between the English and the German,with precise little jabs I enjoyed very much. My first Forster, and certainly won’t be my last.

Read from December 31st, 2011 to January 19th, 2012.

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

Hazel is a 16-year-old girl with Stage IV thyroid cancer, who thanks to a new, experimental drug, has been able to get her tumors reduced to a manageable size. She doesn’t go to school and her best friend is her mom. Cue Augustus Waters, a gorgeous boy in remission that Hazel meets at a cancer support group. Unexpectedly, they both make each other see everything in very different lights.

As everyone knows, I love John Green’s books. John (I feel I can call him John instead of Green, or Mr. Green. We’re buds.) posts weekly videos on Youtube with his brother Hank, and they’re awesome. They talk science, politics, giraffe sex, literature, history, and all those things that come with being a person. When I read a book, the author is a sort of vague, mysterious and elusive superior entity I have no acquaintance with. I usually don’t even know what they look like, and don’t really want to. John is a bit different. Since I see him talking to me on my computer, I feel like I know him, and his writing just feels a tad more personal.

For a few months now, John has slowly been sharing the progress of writing and publishing (and signing) his new book. This was the first release of one of his books I have actually followed from beginning to end, so I feel like this is every bit mine as it is his. I loved reading it and going all “I remember when he referenced this in a video!” and “I’m so glad I read The Great Gatsby before reading this!” and even “Ooooh, so that’s where the Magritte comes in.”

But this isn’t a review of John or even Nerdfighteria, it’s a review of The Fault in Our Stars. It’s hilarious and sad and very, very good. This is also the first book I’ve finished in 2012, and I’m just going to go ahead and not read anything else, because everything will pale in comparison.

Apart from the brilliant writing, which we all know will be quoted for all eternity on Tumblr, there is sort of this underlying idea that has been gnawing at my brain for a while now: How do you make yourself remembered? This is a question that I feel John has tried to answer in his previous book An Abundance of Katherines and, to a certain extent, in all of his books. This makes me feel a bit better, because it’s nice knowing a responsible adult who seemingly has things figured out, doesn’t really have them completely figured out. His books came to me in the most perfect time possible. I’d left the awkward teenage phase, and was starting to enter the “I’m going to college next year, better get my act together and start thinking critically” phase.

It’s both amazing and awful to realize there is more to the world than just your navel, and terrifying to feel you’re just another high school student stuck in the same place. We all struggle with this notion, in some way or another, and it’s nice reading The Fault in our Stars and knowing that it is fine if you die without having conquered the modern equivalent of the Roman empire.

Amsterdam! Oh, the Amsterdam section! I love Amsterdam. I’ve only been there once, for 3 days, just like Hazel and Augustus, and it’s magical. I felt insanely nostalgic whenever I watched John’s videos in Amsterdam, because it’s one of my favourite cities in the world and I think John captured it really well. It just has this sort of magic that cannot be explained merely through words. I think it’s all the water. (John, I love all the water references, it reminded of Gatsby and Howards End, well done.).

Hazel, our protagonist, is a girl. None of John’s previous books had a female leading character. I think John got it perfectly. Sometimes, there are all these Important Things going all around you, and you just care about the fact a boy touched your face. Sometimes you get really self-conscious about your clothes even though it almost never matters. I get you, Hazel, I get you.

There’s also the cancer thing going through this book. I’ve seen terminally ill, and I was half-expecting this book to be all “heroic cancer victims fought bravely” and “loving family supported them to the end”. I’m glad I didn’t. People turn into assholes sometimes, because people are people and they are not their metastasized cancer. There is a latent feeling of death throughout this book, and frankly, it’s a bit heartbreaking. I don’t think I’ve cried this hard reading a book since I read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. In 2007. I’ve read a great deal of books in the meantime, some of them quite exceptional. But yes, I cried, and I cried for Hazel and Augustus but also for Esther and for people I’d known but who are gone and for whom I’d never cried, for people I don’t know, for people I will know, and I guess I cried a bit for myself, not because I’m sick, but because I’m dying and also because it’s alright not to change the world.

So, yes.

Thanks, John.

Read from January 16th to January 17th, 2011.