Swapclubnz's Blog

The King of England has called upon his Mistress in the Art of Death – anatomist and doctor Adelia Aguilar – to accompany ten-year-old Princess Joanna on her thousand-mile journey to marry the King of Sicily. They must take with them the legendary sword Excalibur.
And so Adelia sets sail with the golden princess and her lavish party of nobles, musicians, servants, laundresses, grooms, luggage and treasure. But when members of the procession begin to die and it looks as though Adelia is to blame, there are dangerous accusations of witchcraft.
Meanwhile one traveller, armed with a brilliant disguise and a personal vendetta, has been watching Adelia all too closely. This secret assassin wants her dead … but he wants her to suffer first. 

Ariana Franklin is a pseudonym for Diana Norman. Under this name, she also wrote historical novels. I will write a review on the one I read which was set in 18^th century England. I’m slightly confused by the use of a pseudonym if they are all historical novels. As far as I can see, she wrote another one as Ariana Franklin which is set in 1922 Berlin. Maybe it’s because the Ariana Franklin ones are “novels of suspense”? I will report back.

 I listened to the first 3 books in the series as audiobooks and I enjoyed them so much that I searched out the fourth as an old-fashioned library book. These are historical crime novels but very unusual as our protagonist is – in a novel set in the 12^th century – what we would call nowadays a forensic pathologist. I like history and I like historic novels and though I can be put off if I think too much liberty has been taken with history (i.e. people just act totally out of would have been let’s say 15^th century character), I really appreciate novels that display good subject knowledge. Dorothy Dunnett, for example, must have been at least as learned as her Renaissance protagonists. Sharon Penman is another author who seems so easily picture a period in time very alien to us.

 And Diana Norman as Ariana Franklin is very sensitive about what life would have been like at the time of King Henry and his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine and their 4 quarrelling sons. She brings to life this early period when religion was very central to everybody’s life and where the majority of people in a feudal system were at the mercy of the few powerful, all the way up to the king. Add to that some very interesting crimes she has to solve and you get a great read if you’re still short of a few novels for your summer reading list.

 Highly recommended.

 The Mistress of the Art of Death
The Serpent’s Tale (The Death Maze)
Relics of the Dead (Grave Goods)
A Murderous Procession (The Assassin’s Prayer)

This is one of the ebooks I got out from Auckland libraries. I’m not quite sure what made me pick it, probably the title because I’m a sucker for anything that might be about geography or geology. But it was a lucky pick.

Kamila Shamsie is a Pakistani writer born in 1973. She lives in England and Karachi and writes in English.

In Kartography, we meet Raheen and Karim as young teenagers. They have known each other from infancy and are inseparable friends. But there is a secret in their past. At some time in their past, before the Pakistani civil war in 1971, their fathers were engaged to the other’s mother. But then “the music changed” and they swapped partners.

 The story is told by Raheen and it explores more than just the complicated personal relationship between Raheen’s and Karim’s parents. It’s a homage to Karachi and its people. It’s a criticism of Karachi/Pakistani society. It’s a love story. It’s a coming of age story very skilfully portraying how the acts and convictions of the parents influence their children. It was a history lesson to me who had no idea that Bangladesh was ever part of Pakistan (which geographically makes absolutely no sense to me!)

 But more than that, it’s one of those few books that are so well written that you almost step into it. It’s not just a good story, Kamila Shamsie plays with words and uses words to convey more than just what we read on the surface. It’s a clever book. It’s an interesting book. It’s a lovely story.

Kamila Shamsie has written 5 novels and don’t be surprised if you find me writing about any others of her books. I think I quite would like to try Salt and Saffron next.

Highly recommended

In the City by the Sea (1998)
Salt and Saffron (2000)
Kartography (2002)
Broken Verses (2005)
Burnt Shadows (2009)

This is the first book I read on my new Kobo reader. So this is a combined review. Which is quite fitting as Stephen Fry is a well-known blogger and quite a technology junkie.

I had a bit of a rocky start getting into this book and ran out of time. Yes, your Kobo reader will know if the book has expired and you won’t be able to access it anymore. On my second run (very popular book so I had to wait for a bit to get it back), it was a very good read and the e-reader lasted the distance, some 450-odd pages – or in time-terms a week. It didn’t go much beyond that though it’s meant to last for 2 weeks of average reading. The reader is not meant to use power while you’re reading, only for any action you take, i.e. change the settings or turn the page. I’m not sure whether 450 pages in a week is fast reading, I probably read about a book a week, let’s say around 300 pages so I would expect 600 pages out of it. So for battery power, I can’t give it any more than satisfactory.

Back to Stephen Fry. I’ve read all his other books and I do like his style, the lightness and the humour that come through. This is an autobiography. From the time he spent a short time in prison for some youthful transgression to when he fell for some unlawful substances. As an actor and television personality (though he might not appreciate that as an evaluation (he mentions in his book that he has done more writing than acting but that when people try to discredit his opinion, they would call him an actor) … Start that sentence again. On TV he seems self-assured and he also mentions that he gets approached by people asking him how he does it. But the most prominent and consistent tenor of the book is that he feels anything but, that is he felt insecure all through his life and certainly throughout the time described in this book – which is probably why he fell victim to whatever the substance is he hints at. If you like Stephen Fry, you will enjoy this book. He comes across very much like himself, humorous and very entertaining. I’m not familiar with his early work (too young and lived in the wrong country) but it’s also quite interesting to get a little glimpse behind the scenes of what we do know.

My review of the Kobo Reader is not quite that convincing. It’s got its good sides but generally it’s disconcerting always having to think of whether your “book is charged” (and it happened twice to me that I had it charged, didn’t touch it for a week and when I picked it up it said it needed charging – and that despite it’s not meant to use power unless in use). – I had hoped that it will give me easier access to foreign books but so far find the prices higher than what I’m prepared to pay. Don’t forget that you can’t resell an eBook or even lend it to a friend. Also, I wonder what happens should your e-reader ever fail. Will that mean you lose your entire library?

tbc

I did a marathon sprint on the Thursday Next series as I had the sixth one (One of our Thursdays is missing) from the library and was rereading books 1 to 5 before having to return it to the library. 

I reviewed Jasper Fforde’s previous book (Shades of Grey) some time ago and I’m sure I’ve mentioned him before as I am quite a fan. Anybody who loves book must love his because he displays such a love and knowledge of books and literature. Characters from other books come alive in his. Maybe some time in the future, you made it in literature if your book or one of your characters is mentioned in one of his novels? 

I think his books are published under the genre fantasy but they are hard to put in any one box. He certainly has enough imagination for half a dozen authors to spare and happily mixes fantasy, crime and comedy. 

The Thursday Next novels are set in Swindon. On the surface, it may be very much like the town in England but it’s altogether a different world. Our heroine Thursday is a veteran of the Crimean War (ongoing after 100-odd years) and has recently returned to Swindon to join the local Literary Detective (SpecOps 27- Special Operations handle any policing that is seen to be too particular for the regular police force). Her pet is a cloned Dodo and her father a ChronoGuard, the Spec Ops branch that looks after time. 

If I wrote in my last review of the Harry Potter that little is new, there’s little in a Jasper Fforde novel that is not new! The pace never slackens, funny, new ideas are coming thick and fast. The books are not only the most entertaining I read in years but they also challenge us with the way he treats our established world. 

But the Thursday Next novels are set in two worlds. Next to the “real world”, Thursday also can enter a book and some of the novels are entirely set in the BookWorld where we learn all about how books are made and what makes a good book. Remember something I mentioned the other day about what contributes to a good book? Well, Jasper Fforde put that a lot better than I ever could: Pace, Atmosphere, Plot, Prose and Character. And he’s got it all.

 Bibliography:
The Eyre Affair
Lost in a Good Book
The Well of Lost Plots
Something Rotten
First Among Sequels
One of our Thursdays is missing

He also has another series called the Nursery Crime Division and the above-mentioned start to a new series ‘Shades of Grey’. A recently published book ‘The Last Dragon-Slayer’ is the start to another new series.

Anybody who doesn’t like the Harry Potter novels? I think they are so much fun to read, great stories and great characters.

When you read the novels in one go, it becomes quite obvious how she planned the main storyline from the beginning. You notice how things that happened earlier on have a bearing in a later book. I also have to say that I didn’t notice any “broken links”, you know, where the logic is not followed through or a contradiction of what happened earlier, which is quite impressive.

None of it is new, of course. Apart from maybe the idea to have the books grow with its readers. And if I had an eleven-year-old that started to read them now, I might not think that such a good idea. I wonder whether there is parenting advice out there how to handle that particular problem?

Something else that occurred to me is why are so many children’s stories set at boarding schools? Is it because the school essentially is a children’s environment? The kids are definitely in the majority.

Harry Potter also has its detractors. It had some pretty ludicrous criticism levelled at it. From being fantasy to showing witches in a positive light! Well, I’m sure these come from people who are either jealous of all the money she is making or are jealous of any fun anybody is having. Let’s face it, all fiction books by definition are fantasy. So my counterargument would be that at least in the Harry Potter novels, the kids can’t mistake it for real.

I’m very much in fantasy mode at the moment as I’m re-reading the Thursday Next novels in preparation for the 6^th. One of the main issues in “First among Sequels” is the falling readership numbers and I’m sure that is not only true for Thursday’s world. So I would like to credit J K Rowling with having converted many kids to reading books. This alone should make up for anything else people would like to criticise her for.

Well, I have been very quiet for a while. I haven’t read much. Not for the want of trying. It was a bit like an upset stomach. I would start a book and some pages in, sometimes even on the first page, I would lose my appetite. Even with authors I would usually like. – I’m still not reading terribly much but I hope to get better. My medicine, by the way, was Harry Potter. My thought was to read something I knew I enjoy and that was easy to read. I had read the first 3 books years ago so now I went out and got the missing ones and off I went. But more on that later.

What I wanted to say here is that I had been thinking a lot about what makes a good story. Characters, story line, story telling, ideas, language. What is important to make a good book? And I have to say that I don’t have the answer. I actually think that it’s not a single quality but a combination.

Characters are probably the most important. Simply because they carry the story. I don’t think a story needs to be realistic. I really like wacky stories such as Terry Pratchett or Jasper Fforde which are anything but. A story needs to work in itself and if the characters don’t work, the story doesn’t. So I guess what I’m trying to say is that the characters and the story are a package, they support each other but they don’t need to be realistic.

I don’t think elevated language is important to the enjoyment of a book. There are books I hugely enjoyed because I thought the language was just fantastic. But simple language can be still a good read. Yes, you do need a certain minimum vocabulary as using your favourite adjective about 5 times every page is not contributing to my enjoyment of a book. But if none of your adjectives exceeds two syllables, that’s fine with me.

I think the story telling is the more important skill. And I’m not quite sure that this skill shouldn’t be in the package with characters and story line. Have you ever read a book that was okay but it wasn’t really fluent? This one is hard to describe but sometimes the language doesn’t really seem to flow. Something not all that unusual in non-fiction books but you just don’t want it in a novel. A novel is meant to take you from reality, so it needs to be a really smooth ride so you don’t notice all the turns, red lights and sudden braking (unless intended). If you constantly need to check how far to go, it’s a sure sign you’re not having all that much fun.

My last component is ideas. That’s when the author not just tells a nice story but is challenging our perception of things. Jasper Fforde’s slightly different worlds would make a good example but even ordinary novels can throw us the odd idea that is fun to explore. Not absolutely necessary to the enjoyment of a novel, but like beautiful language, it will add to a book.

However, I’m still on a very light diet for the time being. After the Harry Potter novels, I read some unassuming crime novels, ‘The Game of Kings’ by Dorothy Dunnett which is one of my favourite historical novels and I’m now re-reading Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series. Nothing new as yet though I think I would like to try a novel by Barbara Kingsolver next, none in particular, just heard good stuff about her.

Well, I haven’t been reading much lately, that is, most of what I read was on the Christchurch earthquake. My thoughts on that in a separate blog.

I like Alison Weir’s biographies. Like Antonia Fraser, she does seem to take the research as a search for the truth – rather than a confirmation of preconceived ideas.

Searching for the truth in something that happened 500 years ago is not easy, well, it’s impossible really. This book was just on the trial of Anne Boleyn. The few weeks from when she was arrested to when she was executed. So it’s a very detailed look at what happened back then. And there seem to be 2 questions that Alison Weir is trying to answer: Was Anne Boleyn guilty? And did Henry have a hand in framing her?

Alison Weir makes a plausible case for Anne Boleyn’s innocence. Equally, she doesn’t think that Henry was actively involved in framing her. I think, however, we can accuse him of a certain callousness: He dissolved Anne’s household prior to the trial and moved Jane Seymour conveniently close at the time. Well, getting rid of her that way was convenient for him – it removed any doubt on the legitimacy of any children he would have with Jane Seymour. So I think with that view in mind – a successor already lined up, a clean start – he didn’t too much to challenge the accusations.

An interesting read, a window into one of Britain’s best known historical periods.