Books | The Guardian's Journal -- Day [entries|friends|calendar]
Books | The Guardian

[ website | Books | The Guardian ]
[ userinfo | scribbld userinfo ]
[ calendar | scribbld calendar ]

Our Bodies, Their Battlefield by Christina Lamb review – groundbreaking on women and war [26 Feb 2020|07:30am]

Rape is as much a weapon of war as a Kalashnikov ... the acclaimed foreign correspondent has written a harrowing but vital book

As a junior researcher on a TV documentary in Uganda in 1986, I was told to ask a question that was the dark cliche of war reporting: “Anyone here been raped and speak English?” To my horror, a teenage girl stepped shyly forward, eyes cast downwards. Since then, I have come across hundreds of women raped in wars around the world – and I have found kinder ways of establishing if they want to tell their story.

In her harrowing new book, foreign correspondent Christina Lamb explains that rape in conflict is often seen as a “private crime”, an incidental atrocity, when it is “as much of a weapon of war as the machete, club or Kalashnikov”. She gives priority to the stories of individual women, many of whom feel validated by speaking out, but understands why other victims remain silent. Often they feel ashamed, or fear ostracism from their own communities. “You won’t find these women’s names in the history books or on the war memorials,” Lamb writes. “But to me they are the real heroes.”

Continue reading...
post comment

Theft by Luke Brown review – black comedy of sexualised class war [26 Feb 2020|09:00am]
A enigmatic chancer worms his way into a world of privilege and power in this pithy satirical novel

The narrator of Luke Brown’s second novel is “a white male from the north of England, small town, moribund, working class-cum-middle-class … a reader, an autodidact, a would-be escapee”. Paul is a bookseller and occasional hack; he writes two columns – one about books, the other about haircuts – for a fashion magazine. With his beard, thick-rimmed glasses and garish bicycle, he could be your typical hipster. But he feels like an impostor in his east London milieu. When he meets a mercurial novelist called Emily, he believes he has found a kindred spirit: “Her Glaswegian accent was carefully enunciated … she might have planed the edges off it herself, like I had done with mine, sliver by sliver, to wedge between where we had been and where we now wanted admittance.”

Emily lives in an affluent part of town with her much older partner, Andrew, a distinguished conservative public intellectual. Andrew has a daughter, Sophie, an expensively educated Marxist and wannabe journalist in her early 20s. Emily is dismissive of her, remarking that “the egalitarianism she professes is abstract rather than intuitive”. Paul then meets Sophie at a book launch and they engage in some flirtatious sparring about privilege, identity politics and Philip Roth. A thoroughly unwholesome scenario duly unfolds: Paul befriends Andrew, and sets about the task of seducing both his partner and his daughter simultaneously.

Continue reading...
post comment

Top 10 books about imaginary friends | Camilla Bruce [26 Feb 2020|12:00pm]

From Lewis Carroll to Vladimir Nabokov and Shirley Jackson, the best of these stories combine fantasy with very real psychology

In fiction, the imaginary friend lives where fantasy, mental illness and the supernatural meet, and it is often intriguingly hard to tell just where it belongs. Children’s imaginary friends are often endearing, as seeen in the countless stories about favourite toys that come to life. But once the protagonist is adult, the imaginary friend can become a sinister presence – a warning that something is wrong. Sometimes it is the relationship itself that is imagined, in fiction as in reality, as when a stalker is convinced they share a special bond with their prey. There is also the eerie notion that a reader’s sense of closeness to a fictional character is a form of imaginary friendship as well.

My debut novel, You Let Me In, is about Cassandra, whose whole life has been influenced by her invisible friend, Pepper-Man. He can provide comfort and protection, but he can also be dangerous, to Cassandra herself and to people around her. It is not so easy, however, to figure out exactly who, or what, Pepper-Man is. He could be a fairy from the forest, as Cassandra firmly believes, or a creature that lives solely in Cassandra’s mind, as her psychiatrist is just as convinced.

Continue reading...
post comment

Game of Thrones honoured in new classification of pterosaur [26 Feb 2020|12:47pm]

Targaryendraco wiedenrothi has been renamed after House of Targaryen in George RR Martin’s fantasy saga

George RR Martin is celebrating after a palaeontologist, who named a new genus of pterosaur after the dragons of House Targaryen, agreed with him that dragons should have two, rather than four, legs.

The fossilised bones of Targaryendraco wiedenrothi, which lived 130m years ago, were discovered by Kurt Wiedenroth in 1984 in northern Germany. The specimen was originally classified within the Ornithocheirus group of pterosaurs, as Ornithocheirus wiedenrothi, but the toothy pterosaur has now been reassigned to the new genus Targaryendraco. Six other already known pterosaurs were also found to be closely related to the group, which features pterosaurs with wingspans between 10 and 26 feet, and narrow snouts.

Continue reading...
post comment

Tudor fat: long books like Hilary Mantel's don't need to be hard [26 Feb 2020|02:28pm]

Suggestions that the 900-page The Mirror & the Light needs editing are underestimating readers - but if you’re unsure you can do it, there are ways to better enjoy long books

Not since Henry VIII first got that glint in his eye has such fuss been made over an urge to start chopping, but here we are: critics the world over are wringing their hands over the length of Hilary Mantel’s much anticipated The Mirror & the Light, which is due out next week.

“Even professed admirers of Mantel may find it hard to finish,” Prospect’s review read, suggesting that people who have waited eight years for the third book in a trilogy may not be invested enough. Many other reviews have also suggested (politely, and often underneath glowing praise) that the book, longer than Wolf Hall and double the size of Bring Up the Bodies at roughly 900 pages, needed more of an edit. I say roughly – almost every review has made mention of the page count and somehow also come up with a different figure to marvel at: 863 pages in the Independent, 912 in the Telegraph and “almost 900” nearly everywhere else, while the New York Times weighed the US edition as a mere “nearly 800 pages”.

Continue reading...
post comment

Clive Cussler, bestselling adventure novelist, dies aged 88 [26 Feb 2020|05:32pm]

American author of more than 80 books forged path as prolific commercial writer who sometimes published four books a year

Clive Cussler, the bestselling American author of adventure novels including Sahara and maritime thrillers starring his hero Dirk Pitt, has died aged 88.

The author and co-author of more than 80 books, Cussler sold more than 100m books around the world and was published in more than 40 languages. He made the New York Times bestseller list 17 times in a row. His fortune was estimated to be $120m (£92.8m).

Continue reading...
post comment

navigation
[ viewing | February 26th, 2020 ]
[ go | previous day|next day ]