A blot on the landscape?

Leaving behind a world of class divisions and clever caricatures, we crossed the boundary of the worlds and entered the fantasy land of Inkheart. Cosimo and I both like a lot of children’s fantasy – but not this one. In contrast to our previous read, this book was finished, but perhaps shouldn’t have been. The plot was clever, but the execution poor. The idea is that a writer’s stories become real and his characters turn on him, with both travelling back and forth between the real world and the story world. It should have been fun, but the characters were so uncompelling that, in contrast to Gogol, they left you wanting to put the book down rather than pick it up. The dangers never felt at all real, and the main villain never provided the menace (or the intelligence) that the role required. The language was also turgid, and we waded through it to the end and then thankfully turned our attention to The Hall of a Thousand Columns.

In quest of Russian souls

This blog has already come back from the brink once, now it’s had a near death experience – but it’s undergoing a resurrection. Fortunately our reading has not been going as slowly as our blogging – but we’re now testing out a new rule: not to start a new book until we’ve blogged the last one. We’ll see how that goes.

Taking up from where we left off for now, we left the wilds of the Deep South and crossed to rural Russia, where we followed Chichikov, a 19^th Century Russian social climber in his pursuit of serfs – dead serfs to be precise. Now I do not have a Russian soul and have rarely truly enjoyed (though I have appreciated) any Russian book. Gogol’s Dead Souls was an exception. The book was clever, funny and an easy read – although it also contains some quite sharp social commentary. The knowledge that it was never completed had put me off reading it for years by, but this is actually largely irrelevant. The fundamental premise of the book is both brilliant and bizarre. It centres on Chichikov’s efforts to exploit a buerocratic loophole, enabling him to build up his estate and thereby his social status by acquiring dead serfs. It is more character than plot driven however and what makes it memorable and amusing are the larger than life characters that Chichikov encounters – and this is the reason that it doesn’t really matter that the book was never finished. Also, his message about the flaws of the stratified Russian society of his time comes through loud and clear.

A return to reading

Well it has been so long since I updated this that I thought I would start again simply with a list of the books Cosimo and I have read over the last couple of years and then just give a few ponderings to get this voyage on the road again (if indeed you do voyage by road) .

Cakes and Ale (W. Somerset Maugham)

The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne)

Leave it to Psmith (P.G. Wodehouse)

Hard Times (Andy McNab ... ok, maybe not. Charles Dickens, perhaps)

Travels with a Tangerine (Tim Mackintosh-Smith)

Confessions of St. Augustine (Augustine of Hippo)

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)

Dead Souls (Gogol)

Inkheart (Cornelia Funke)

Hall of a Thousand Columns (Tim Mackintosh-Smith)

Songlines (Bruce Chatwin)

Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert)

The Riders (Tim Winton)

The Last of the Wine (Mary Renault)

Resurrection (Leo Tolstoy)

The Once and Future King (T.H. White)

Castle of Crossed Destinies (Italo Calvino)

Right when last seen about a year ago, this blog was busy dealing with Leave it to Psmith which was frothy, fun and a bit of a relief, but then we got back to misery again with Hard Times. Ok it wasn't all that miserable - there were definite fun sections but the title has to give you some kind of clue that it wasn't all cheer and good humour. The opening though is brilliant - anybody who relies too much on facts should be forced to read it. I must admit though that I find the beginning the much more memorable than the end which has rather receded in both Cosimo and my minds.

From there we decided to fast-forward through the centuries again and actually go travelling, seeing the world through the pages of a book in Travels with a Tangerine. Our time-travelling took us in the steps of a 21st Century writer, tracking the 14th Century Arab, Ibn Battutah throughout North Africa. This was without a doubt one of the highlight books of all that we have read - by turns fascinating, informative and hilarious. I must admit, it left me with no desire to sample the Morrocan delicacy of rotten fish (you could almost smell it from the pages).

Shortly after this, our voyage ran fairly well smack into a brick wall with the Confessions of Augustine. I am sure it is a great book - but it is not one for casual reading. Anyone who has read this blog knows that I have followed a certain man of Hippo through pages of his life. Unfortunately, I never made it to the end. I hope that God had more patience than I.

Abandoning Augustine still in North Africa, I hopped across the Atlantic to the Mississippi. The sheer exuberance and celebration of the world and what it offered, of mischief and adventure, but also of humanity in everyone makes The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a wonderful book (and a big relief after Confessions). OK I don't think I shall ever find Tom Sawyer anything but profoundly annoying but he is still in many ways a real person. I had been rather avoiding this book for no good reason for years and I loved it. The dialect that Twain captures is also so clever. I don't think I have ever fully appreciated his skill as a writer before.

Well that has brought our travels a bit further, I shall leave you with Huck on the banks of the Mississippi for a brief (hopefully) pause before we head to Russia in the next stage of our voyage.