Pandora’s Box by Giselle Green

Pandora’s Box is another one of my recent ‘fluffy’ reads. In many ways it is similar to the Jodi Picoult book I read a while ago, though I like Vanishing Acts somewhat better. This will probably be the most negative review I have put up here since I started this blog a little over a year ago.

Rachel Wetherby is a divorced mother of two. Her oldest, fourteen-year old Shelley, has a terminal disease that leaves her more and more incapacitated over time. Taking care of Shelley takes up most of Rachel’s time and has more or less put her life on hold. One day, Rachel receives a box of old memorabilia , letters and a diary from her mom Pandora (hence the title – I found it a bit too obvious). Opening up this box revives memories and secrets that Rachel would rather not be reminded of. At the same time, Shelley is planning to end her life by jumping off a cliff, because she wants a dignified end to her life. She doesn’t want to go through the final stages of her disease and end her life in the completely debilitating state her best friend Miriam (who suffered and died from the same disease) did. Shelley’s plan is complicated by her meeting and falling in love with a boy she met on the internet. Pandora’s Box is told from the alternating perspectives of Rachel and Shelley.

To be honest, I didn’t care much for this book. The characters were almost too obviously good (Kieran, Frank, Maggie, Sol) or just plain annoying and self-obsessed (Surinda, Lily and Bill) and I didn’t really care much for them. The plot was fairly thin, the ending too dramatic and with some unlikely elements, on top of a cliff in Cornwall on a dark and rainy night with helicopters flying about (though the chopper was around not for the reason you’d expect), but I hand it to Giselle Green that you have to read on until the very last paragraph to find out the ending. The writing was not bad, but not spectacular. For some reason, I preferred Picoult’s writing.

I am not saying this was a bad book, it just didn’t do anything for me. If you like Jodi Picoult and similar writers, you might want to give Pandora’s Box a try, though, and you might end up with a different opinion.

Reading Pandora’s Box, Vanishing Acts and Killing Floor only confirmed my suspicions: I want a bit more bite to my books than what especially the first two had to offer me (I much preferred the third one of these three). And if I do want ‘easy’ reads, I prefer mysteries (such as Elizabeth George, Minette Walters, Ruth Rendell, P.D. James, Henning Mankell – it’s been too long I read any of these writers!) or a well-written thriller. Tear-jerking drama is not my thing, I suppose. But it was fun to read outside my comfort zone for a bit, so I don’t regret it. Never say never, but I think it will be good while before I pick up any Picoultesque books again (sorry, I just had to put that word in).

I seem to be in a bit of a reading dud lately, not reading any really good books, but then again, I have been spoiled this year with some great books that made the list of my favorite books ever.

If you read Pandora’s Box, please leave a link to your review in the comments and I will add it to this post.

Killing Floor by Lee Child

Recently I have read more lighter books than usual, book that don’t require so much brain power. I guess I have overdosed a bit on the heavy stuff and I am mixing things up a bit. Which feels like just fine for the moment. Though I have had two brainy non-fiction books going on the side for while now as well (Orhan Pamuk and Taner Akcam, see the sidebar).

Killing Floor by Lee Child fitted the need for lighter reading perfectly. It is the first book in a series of eleven that feature Jack Reacher, an ex-Military Police who wanders around the US leaving no trace. He doesn’t carry credit cards, ID or a driver’s license, pays everything in cash, and travels light. He grew up a military kid living on US military bases all over the world, so he basically has been a wanderer most of his life.

On the way from Florida to Atlanta Reacher makes a flash decision to get off the Greyhound bus near the small town of Margrave, Georgia. Within a few hours he is arrested for a murder he didn’t commit. In the next few days more bodies turn up and when it turns out that one of these is the body of someone Reacher knew, he stays in Margrave to find the killers. Throw in a cute police woman named Roscoe (we never learn her first name), and you have a pageturner of a thriller.

I found the first one hundred pages or so a bit slow, but I still got in the story enough to want to go on. Then I raced through the rest of the book, to the extent that I was even reading most of the way on a 100km ride in a minivan out of town. I usually don’t like reading on the road, because it makes me feel funny. I don’t get car-sick, but my body is not entirely okay with reading on the bus or in a car (when I was younger I didn’t have this problem at all and I would read endlessly on the road).

The writing was fast-paced (even in that first part of the book that felt slower), mostly because the story is told in first person singular, from the point of view of Jack Reacher. Often the text would read like his thoughts, half-finished sentences, subject missing. But it worked. Despite this POV, you don’t get to know Jack Reacher very well. You only learn about his past and his present thoughts inasmuch as it is connected to the story. But then again: who reads a thriller for character development instead of plot?

The story of Killing Floor is the kind that, if it were a movie, I wouldn’t care about, in large part because of the violence. It’s the kind of pointless violence I can do without and that I really don’t need to watch. While reading this book, I realized that coming across that kind of violence in a book is different for me. I still don’t think there’s any fun in it, and that it is rather pointless, but I can handle it better in print: I just read over it and kind of forget the details, I don’t picture it in my head with all the gore. Which is kind of interesting, because at other times I am rather visual when reading a book: sometimes I can see the entire book as a movie in my imagination.

Towards the end, I had a bit of a problem with the plot, the major thing being Picard’s change of role which left me with the major question: Why? This never received a satisfying answer. But for what it is, I enjoyed Killing Floor. It provides exactly what you expect from this type of book, not more and not less. I wouldn’t mind reading more of the Jack Reacher series when I come across them, but I think that in a way once you’ve read one, you’ve read them all.

Challenge Round-up

Apart from one that is still going on and one that I failed miserably (but expected to fail – don’t ask me why I signed up for it then), I finished all my challenges a while ago, but I never got around to writing round-ups. So here is one big post to round off all the challenges at once.

The ongoing one is the Russian Reading Challenge, which goes on till December 31st and requires us to read at least four books. I have already read enough for this challenge, but have plenty more Russia related titles on the TBR-pile, so I will continue this one.

The one I failed is the Celebrating 100 Years of Anne of Green Gables challenge, organized by Claire at Blue Archipelago. When I signed up, I already knew I’d fail (why sign up then?) because I was reading Anne of Green Gables in daily installments through Daily Lit. And there was no way I was going to finish that before July 31st. I have finished reading the book by now and enjoyed it a lot, but never got around to writing a review.

With this admission off my chest, let’s move on to the challenges I ended successfully.

First, the In Their Shoes challenge. I read all the titles that were on my original list plus on extra. These are the books I read (links go to my reviews):
* Simon Sebag Montefiore – Young Stalin
* Peter Balakian – Black Dog of Fate
* Shirin Ebadi – Iran Awakening
* Azar Nafisi – Reading Lolita in Tehran
* Mary S. Lovell – The Mitford Girls

All these authors were new to me. There was no major dud among these five books, I actually enjoyed them all, but the one I liked least was Reading Lolita in Tehran. My favorite was Black Dog of Fate.

All my reviews are also posted on the blog that was set up for this challenge.

Second, the Orbis Terrarum challenge, which required us to read nine books from nine different countries. These are the books I read:
* Afghanistan: Khaled Hosseini – The Kite Runner
* Russia: Vassily Aksyonov – Generations of Winter
* Botswana: Alexander McCall Smith – The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency
* Armenia: Goar Markosyan-Kasper – Penelope
* Syria: Rafik Schami – De duistere kant van de liefde (The Dark Side of Love)
* Ireland: Anne Enright – The Gathering
* Israel: Amos Oz – Don’t Call it Night (Noem het nog geen nacht)
* Spain: Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote (Part 1 and Part 2)
* England / United Kingdom: Virginia Woolf – The Waves

I had read books by Rafik Schami, Amos Oz and Khaled Hosseini before, the others were all new to me writers. Penelope and Don’t Call it Night were rereads from up to ten years ago. The two least favorite books of this list are easy: The Gathering and The Waves. I enjoyed all the other books, but my favorite is also easy to pick: Rafik Schami’s The Dark Side of Love.

Finally, the Chunkster Challenge, which required participants to read four books of at least 450 pages. These are all the chunksters I have read so far this year:
* Mary S. Lovell – The Mitford Girls
* Vassily Aksyonov – Generations of Winter
* Rafik Schami – De duistere kant van de liefde / The Dark Side of Love
* Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote (Part 1 and Part 2)
* Orlando Figes – The Whisperers
* Anne Applebaum – Gulag: A History
That’s already more than the required four, so I am calling it quits on this challenge as well (though I will be reading more chunksters this year).
These were all new to me authors, except for Rafik Schami. All of these books were good to excellent, and I can’t pick just one favorite. The two that share the top spot are The Whisperers and The Dark Side of Love, with Gulag coming in closely behind.

Ararat by Frank Westerman

Usually I put a picture of the book cover in my post, but this time I don’t. I can give you a picture of the real thing. This is Mount Ararat as it stands over Yerevan and as I see it everyday on my way to work or when I look out of my bedroom window (if the weather cooperates, that is).

For the really curious, there is a webcam on Ararat here, which gives you a live picture of Mount Ararat.

Most people, if they know anything about this mountain at all, will know Mount Ararat from the Bible as the mountain where Noah’s Ark stranded after the flood. For the Armenian people, though, Ararat has another meaning. It stands for the lands they lost, the lands of eastern Turkey that Armenians traditionally inhabited but which they lost when up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed during the Armenian Genocide at the beginning of the twentieth century. The thing is, no matter how closely Mount Ararat is located to Armenia and its capital Yerevan, the Ararat is located just across the border in Turkey. And this border has been closed for some seventeen years now.

The hold of Ararat over the city is impressive (more so than on the picture, I,d say). You only have to be in Yerevan on a clear day and you will immediately understand why this mountain and its location are so important to Armenians. Though I don’t have the emotional tie to the mountain that Armenians have, I still think, having lived in Yerevan for almost four years, that the view of Ararat is an impressive and beautiful sight and I often find myself looking for the mountain, just to “check if it is still there”. I have become so used to its presence.

Now, from the mountain to the book Ararat. I had it on my shelves for a year and a half before I finally picked it up. I wanted to read the book and was looking forward to it, but somehow the time or my mood were never right. Now that I read it, I kind of regret that I didn’t pick it up sooner, which is very rare for me. Usually, even if I was totally bowled over by book, I don’t feel regret at not reading it before, I am just happy that I read it all. But for some reason, this time it is different. I really wish I had picked this one up sooner. The reason why I finally moved it way up to the top of the TBR-list, is that I noticed some six weeks ago that it has been translated into English.

Frank Westerman (English version of his site is here) is a Dutch journalist and writer who was raised in a very religious (Dutch Reformed) family. He actually grew up in the same region where I was born and raised. Not the exact same area, but close enough for me to be able to relate to and recognize things he mentions in his book. So, apart from the mountain there were other connections with the book for me, which I suppose one way or another affected my enjoying this book. Over the years Westerman started doubting his religion and religion in general. Ararat is about the journey back “to his roots” and about Westerman’s search for why and when his ideas about religion changed. The central link in this personal journey is Mount Ararat. It is about religion, yes, and its role in a person’s life, but it is also more than that. Westerman fills the book with information about the mountain, the role it and the story of Noah’s Ark plays in the monotheistic religions, the arkologists (people who are searching for the actual Ark of Noah; link takes you to a Wikipedia-site with lots of links), geological information, Westerman’s preparations to climb the mountain. The book culminates in Westerman’s attempt to climb Mount Ararat. If this sounds somewhat chaotic and overloaded for a book of 284 pages (in the Dutch edition), rest assured: it is not. The book is a lot more structured than you might think based my description. Also, it is very readable, because of the changes of pace and the mix of the personal and the informative. I found the book extremely readable and enjoyed it very much. But then, I was somewhat biased from the start.

To make this review go full circle I will end with one of my favorite passages of the book, when Westerman stands somewhere halfway up the Ararat and is looking down on Armenia. I have often wondered what Armenia would look like from up there. The translation (and a bit of paraphrasing) is mine, so my apologies for any mistakes or lack of quality .

From under the screen of clouds that were gathering around the top of the Ararat, we looked down on half of Armenia, which stretched like a fata morgana towards the horizon. It was like being in the top stands of a sports stadium. Down in the arena we saw the sunlight reflect on Yerevan’s highrise buildings. With bare eyes, one could distinguish the split obelisk of the Genocide Memorial, and the statue of Mother Armenia on an opposite hill, and the miniature vulcano of the airport. Further to the west, at the foot of the now snowfree Aragats, I could see the four stately coolingtowers of Armenia’s only nuclear power plant.

This is the original quote in Dutch:

Zo van onder de luifel van wolken die zich rond de top van de Ararat formeerde, keken we neer op half Armenie, dat als een luchtspiegeling tot aan de horizon lag uitgevloeid. Het was alsof we ons in de nok van een stadion bevonden. In de arena beneden zagen we het zonlicht tegen de hoogbouw van Jerevan kaatsen. Je kon de gespleten obelisk van het genocidemonument met het blote oog onderscheiden, net als het Moeder Armeniebeeld op een tegenover liggende heuvel en de miniatuurvulkaan van de luchthaven. Meer naar het westen, aan de voet van de nu sneeuwvrije Aragats, ontwaarde ik ook de vier statige koeltorens van Armenies enige kerncentrale.(p236)

Okay then, I will give you a picture of the cover of the Dutch edition of Ararat. But only because it is such a simple, beautiful cover. Above the title it’s Noah’s Ark and it is actually cut out of the cover, so you see the first page of the inside book. That page is covered in a print of pairs of different animals that joined Noah in the Ark.

Here are reviews from English newspapers the Telegraph and the Independent, but there are more reviews out there. I haven’t found any reviews by bloggers yet, but I do know that Gondal Girl has the book on her TBR-pile (hint! hint! ).

According to his website, several other books by Frank Westerman will be translated into English, among them Engineers of the Soul, which I read some years back and enjoyed a lot (another one that’s up for a reread).

The Sunday Salon: The Implied Author by Orhan Pamuk

The Implied Author is a speech Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk gave when he received the Puterbaugh literary prize in 2006, a few months before he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. In this text he discusses how writing is a habit, a need even, for him. The only online English text of this speech I could find is in some places slightly different from the Dutch text I read. I took the quotes from the English version, which you can find here. Other than that, it is also printed in Pamuk’s collection of essays Other Colors.

In order to be happy, Pamuk begins, he needs a daily dose of literature, like other people need a daily dose of medication. This daily dose must meet certain criteria:

First, the medicine must be good. Its goodness is what tells me how true and strong it is. To read a dense, deep passage in a novel, to enter into that world and believe it to be true – nothing makes me happier, nothing binds me more to life. I also prefer it if the writer is dead, because then there is no little cloud of jealousy to darken my admiration.

However, it is different when Pamuk himself is writing. In that case, “the best cure of all, and the greatest source of happiness, is to write a good half page every day.”

If Pamuk hasn’t had his daily fix of literature, either through writing or reading, he becomes deeply unhappy and the world becomes a deeply unhappy place with him. So, Pamuk concludes, “the real hunger (…) is not for literature, but for a room where I can be alone and dream”, a place where he can isolate himself from the distractions and the busyness of the world. To be able to be a good writer, Pamuk needs to be bored, and to be bored he must participate in life, he must get out of this room. Because when he is out in the world he realizes he is watching it all from the sidelines. And that’s when he gets bored and begins to dream.

So the real ingredients of the medicine he has to take every day are “boredom, real life and the life of the imagination.” This is one of the places where my Dutch text differs from the English. The quote I just used, comes from the English version, the Dutch translation omits boredom.

Orhan Pamuk now goes on to ponder how writing is a way to use those daily daydreams, to let them run free: “we choose our subjects, and shape our novels, to suit our daily daydream requirements.”

To write a novel is to be open to these desires, winds and inspirations, to the dark recesses of our minds and their moments of mist and stillness.

For what is a novel but a story that fills its sails with these winds, that answers and builds upon inspirations that blow in from unknown quarters and seizes upon all the daydreams we’ve invented for our diversion, bringing them together into a meaningful whole? Above all, a novel is a basket that carries inside it a dreamworld we wish to keep forever alive, and forever ready. Novels are held together by the little pieces of daydreams that help us, from the moment we enter them, forget the tedious world we long to escape.

Through writing a writer creates a whole new world that grows and expands the more he writes. Pamuk loves to escape to this world and is always reluctant to move back to the ‘real’ world.

As Pamuk stated at the beginning of his speech, his daily dose of literature can be taken by writing or by reading. This implies that a writer’s daydreams and fantasy imaginations, which were initially produced to feed the writer’s own needs, can be a medicine not only to their creator, the writer, but also to their ‘consumers’, the readers:

An imaginative novelist’s greatest virtue is his ability to forget the world in the way a child does, to be irresponsible and delight in it, to play around with the rules of the known world – but at the same time to see through his freewheeling flights of fancy to the deep responsibility that will later allow readers to lose themselves entirely in his novel. He might be spending the whole day playing, but at the same time he carries the deepest conviction that he is more serious than others. This is because he can be looking directly into the centre of things the way that only children can. Having found the courage to set rules for the games he once played freely, he senses that his readers will also allow themselves to be drawn into the same rules, the same language, the same sentences, and therefore the story. To write well is to allow the reader to say, “I was going to say the same thing myself, but I couldn’t allow myself to be that childish.”

Pamuk ends his lecture by adapting Wolfgang Iser’s principle of the ‘implied reader’ to express something he learned in a period when he was being driven out of his own room to ‘participate in life’ and didn’t have time or opportunity to get his daily fix of writing (or daydreaming). He refers to the court-case against him in Turkey in 2006 because he had referred to the Armenian genocide and mass killings of Kurds in the Ottoman Empire.

Iser created a brilliant reader-oriented literary theory. He said that a novel’s meaning resides not in the text, nor in its context, but somewhere between the two. He argues that a novel’s meaning emerges only as it is read, and so when he speaks of the implied reader, he is assigning him or her a special role.

When I was dreaming up the scenes, sentences and details of another book, instead of continuing the novel I was already writing, it was this theory that came back into my mind, and what it suggested to me was this: for every unwritten but dreamed and planned novel (in other words, my own unfinished novel), there must be an implied author. So I would only be able to finish that book when I’d become that book’s implied author. But when I was immersed in political affairs, or – as happens so often in the course of normal life – my thoughts were interrupted by unpaid gas bills, ringing telephones and family gatherings, I was unable to become the author implied by the book in my dreams.(…)But having come through this experience, I have understood why, for 30 years, I have devoted all my strength to becoming the implied author of the books I long to write. This may be important to me because I only want to write big, thick, ambitious novels, and because I write so very slowly. It is not difficult to dream a book. I do this a lot, just as I spend a great deal of time imagining myself as someone else. The difficult thing is to be your dream book’s implied author.

You can read this speech in its entirety here. My post about Orhan Pamuk’s Nobel speech is here.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Last night, after dinner, doing the dishes and some other chores, I made tea and curled up with the cats and a book on the couch while outside it was raining. I spent a very nice couple of hours reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland from beginning to end. At 150 pages plus illustrations it is a fast read, easily finished in one sitting, the perfect book for an evening like yesterday’s.

I first read the original book some ten years or more ago and hadn’t read it since. I have no idea what I thought of the book that time, but this time around I was struck by the timelessness of the adventures of Alice falling down the rabbit-hole and meeting all kinds of unusual animals and creatures in Wonderland; the book was first published in 1865. I was also surprised when I realized how many scenes and characters in this story have become so well-known, mostly, I suppose, due to the Disney movie): the Caucus-Race, the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Tea Party with the March Hare, the Hatter and the Dormouse, and of course the Queen of Hearts (“Off with his head!” – though I should imagine Disney left this character trait of hers out of the movie). I loved the play with words throughout the book (but then, I am a sucker for word games), but especially when Alice meets the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle:

“And how many hours a day did you do lessons?” said Alice, in a hurry to change the subject.
“Ten hours the first day,” said the Mock Turtle: “nine the next, and so on,”
“What a curious plan!” exclaimed Alice.
“That’s the reason they’re called lessons,” the Gryphon remarked: “because they lessen from day to day.”

If you have never read this classic, I highly recommend you do. It won’t take you long, and it is great fun. It is a wonderful little book that will make you smile throughout.

You can read the book online at Project Gutenberg here, but there are many other places on the net where you can find the text. There is an extensive dedicated to all things Alice here.

If you have also reviewed this book, leave a comment with the link to your review and I will add it to this post.