"Company of Liars" by Karen Maitland

I got to agree with Gary on this, "Company of Liars" (henceforth shortened to "COL") is a good read. It packs enough of a story and mystery about this band of travellers who are fleeing the plague to get you to keep going and reading on, right up to the last page. Everyone has a secret to tell in this story, and arguably the one takeaway of the story is the truth does not always set you free.

The storyline rather reminds me of Canterbury Tales, the literary tome by Geoffrey Chaucer, which is about a tale of pilgrims travelling in old England and how they each take turns to recount a story. Beyond this, the resemblance ends. Where Chaucer tells his tale in old English (*winces remembering how painful it was to read the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale for 'A' levels*), this story is narrated by Camelot, whose secret is perhaps the hardest to guess at.

I won't spoil the ending for you, but if you want an interesting read to take a couple of hours off, do consider this book. It has mystery, tragedy and drama rolled into one.

Thanks, G for the book!

Rating: 4 out of 5

"Kingdom Come" by J.G. Ballard

It took me an unusually long time to complete this book. But I stuck to my guns and finished it... eventually.

The plotline is mind-numbingly simple: newly-sacked advertising executive Pearson travels to suburban England from cosmopolitan London after he learns of his father's death from a random shooting in a suburban mall. In his quest to find his father's killer, he hopes to find the father he never knew as well as find some meaning in his own life. He becomes embroiled in a vast conspiracy which eventually embroils him in all the kitsch, glitter and façade of the consumerism sham.

My thoughts about the book, simply put: I don't like the book because it is disturbing and way out in the weird curve. Before doing this review, I did some research and learnt that Ballard is well-known for creating dark and pessimistic landscapes of the world. His vision of the world usually invokes the wasteland and post-modern decay at its most bleak form. No wonder.

Kingdom Come's extremity made it very depressing to follow, which accounted for why I stopped the book several times before finishing it. Notwithstanding, I have to concede that Ballard's prose and vision of a world dedicated to serving a consumerist god is rather compelling to follow.

The book left me with a mildly disturbing aftertaste in my mouth, much in the way (Philip)Roth's books work for me.

Rating: 2 out of 5 geek points

Random trivial: Ballard passed away in Apr 09 this year. Read more about him here.

Company of Liars by Karen Maitland

I usually avoid mystery/thriller fiction. It's probably because I grew up reading a lot of it, Christopher Pike, then Stephen King, and well...good ol Dan Brown.

Am I ashamed to be caught reading the genre? In some way, I am. Mystery/thrillers (I'm not sure what's the exact term) seem to me to be a little too mass market, too accessible, too formulaic and hence, too popular. Then again, cheem books like Ulysses seem rather daunting.

Oh well, leaving that to be resolved another day, the last novel I finished was Company of Liars by Karen Maitland. There isn't a wiki on the novel so here's the Amazon page. The cover caught my eye some time ago, but I've been hesitant to pick it up cos I thought it might be a funky iteration of the Da Vinci code or something (the book is classified under 'Historical Fiction').

I'm glad I eventually bought it though cos I was hooked after the first few pages. Set in England during the spread of the plague in 1348, a ragtag bunch of misfits band together to escape the plague. Maitland tells the story very well, she manages to transport me to the raw and grim setting of 14th century England, and follow her characters in their search for food, shelter, and escape. This is one mystery/thriller I will proudly read in public. 8 stars.

"The Kite-runner" by Khaled Hosseini

As I recall, Don pointed this book out to me more than a year ago. But strangely enough the desire to pick it up never became compelling enough for me to act on it. Then by chance I happened upon it last month while browsing the shelves of the library and decided to add it onto the pile I was juggling in my hands.

[Sidetrack: I'm a glutton when it comes to borrowing books from the library. My "eyes" are always bigger than (a) my actual borrowing limit (which is why I have "swiped" my parents library cards ever since I was old enough to go to the library on my own; and (b) my actual bandwidth to finish them within the 3-week deadline set by NLB. The good people of NLB have since revised the policy to allow for free 1-time renewal AND a maximum of 6 books each, which has needless to say sent me into transports of delight.]

"The Kite-runner" (henceforth shortened to "TKR") didn't make the final discard pile as well, so I ended up borrowing it. And even then, the compulsion to read it was never quite there. Today being a self-imposed stay at home day as I was rather down, I ended up picking it up and completing it at one sitting.

For me, the best part of TKR was when Amir's self-redemption and self-discovery started to happen two-thirds into the story, and how he grew to accept the truth about his father and attempted to do the right thing by his nephew. The war backdrop of Afghanistan interested me less somehow, that was how absorbing the tale of the 2 half-brothers' fates were for me.

At one point when the fates of the 2 half-brothers diverged, I was always conscious of the need to want to turn the page faster while reading the section on Amir's life in America, to find out how Hassan had similarly fared. It was doubly poignant and I think rather well-done of the writer to choose to reveal Hassan's story by having another character speak about what happened to him, indirectly rendering his fate all the more tragic and echoing his choice to always be humble and live in the shadows.

(You can read Don's review here, which I did on completing the book today as I was curious enough to read his review of it again now that I had read the book.)

Rating: 4 out of 5

"The Horrific Sufferings of the Mind-reading Monster Hercules Barefoot, His Wonderful Love and His Terrible Hatred" (HSMRMHB) by Carl-Johan Valgren

A rather uncanny coincidence, that by chance the 2 book reviews I'm about to review today has to do with children, social status, and how both books actually use the picaresque storyline to different effect. It's also rather freaky, on another front, given that of the 6 books I borrowed, I had to read the 2 that bore the most similarity together, when the remaining books could not be more different.

But enough of that.

The first, HSMRMHB, is a picaresque fable recounted in the 3rd person of the love story of the ugly Hercules and the beautiful Henriette. Both were born in a brothel on a stormy night in 1813, and from that day on, their fates were entwined.

Hercules was born deaf and mute, and was so ugly that for the first few years of his life, the procuress of the brothel kept him locked away from the external world, for fear of horrifying the world who could not take the sight of a freak, and of harming a child that whilst ugly, nevertheless had a pure heart that beat only for Henriette.

Beyond his disabilities, Hercules had a gift for reading people's minds and conversing with them in their thoughts. This was to be both his undoing and his salvation in his later life, when he used it to aid him in the search for Henriette, and eventually in his quest for revenge for the murders of Henriette and one churchman who had sought to protect him from charges of demonology.

Another interesting point: do go and take a second look at the book cover in the beginning of this post. You will realise the cover is written in the freak show poster style of that time, and deliberately laid out/ rendered in the style of posters advertising for freak shows -- don't ask me how I know that, but I think I came across something similar before. It was the reason why I picked up this book in the first place, though eventually I was to realise that this cover was an indirect reference to the time Hercules spent as the main attraction in a traveling freak show.

The original book is actually written in Swedish, and while I do not know if any subtle nuancing is lost in the translation, I do think this version remans quite a good read. Though at times, I tend to find the prose a bit awkward, I think overall it still works and whatever that comes across funny, can be chalked up perhaps to the language style of that time.

Hercules' devotion to Henriette is the thread that binds the whole story together, but unlike the usual love story, I thought it had rather dark overtones in its way it placed Hercules as the central figure of the story, and had him struggling against church doctrine, social norms and being the 'outsider' in a normal world. It lingers after you finished the book, but beyond that I guess nothing earth-shattering.

Readibility: 3 out of 5

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon

Wiki of TCIOTDITN

[Unrelated to the geek review - I'm pretty darn irritated with Blogger and my inability to upload a picture successfully. Don't know if it's cos of singnet or whatever silly reasons but it's really getting on my nerves. Rargh.]

TCIOTDITN by Mark Haddon is one of those bestselling must-read books like The Life of Pi and The Kite Runner which I never quite got round to picking up. Well, in the recent Kino National Day sale, I did, which I'm glad for.

Christopher, the 15 year old main character, is autistic and the story is told from his perspective. Through this first person narrative, it opened up my eyes to how the mind of an autistic person works. And it is truly humbling. When we see individuals behaving strangely in public, we automatically keep a wide berth, and, more often than not, label them 'crazy' or 'disturbed'. But as I read how Christopher reacts to people and his environment, and conversely how they react to him, it made me sad to be reminded that our society treats people who are 'different' badly.

I laughed, and I cried reading TCIOTDITN - while the book had plenty of lighthearted moments, there were times when it was just heartbreaking. It truly is a contemporary must-read.

8.5 ninjadogs.

After Dark by Haruki Murakami

Wiki of After Dark!

After Dark is a nice and slim novel, spanning 200 pages of which I completed in about 2 and a half sittings. That's the beauty of Murakami, his stories are always very readable and time seems to fly by as you delve into each chapter.

After Dark is one of the more surreal stories I've read by Murakami. And while I got to the end in one piece, unlike Paprika where I experienced several brain farts along the way, I felt that there were certain parts of After Dark that whooshed over my head. It's like a chef that took great pains to create a delicacy, he spent a lot of time combining the right ingredients, applying intricate cooking methods, and laying it out beautifully on a plate for my consumption. And all I did was pick it up, pop it into my mouth and go," Mmm! Nice!"

I do recommend the book for some nice light reading if you're on a plane or something, just don't expect to fully taste the metaphysical speculation and exploration of compassion and alienation if you're going to wolf it down like me.

7.5 out of 10 ninja nose pellets.