The 100 Book Year

Other people can make life hard. After all, we’re each given this pink-and-grey hunk of headmeat that sits quite apart from everyone else, merrily pumping out our own thoughts and dreams, actions and reactions. Other people help to define who we are, but can also encroach on our own individuality at times. So imagine how it must feel to be a conjoined twin, and never able to be alone. This is the premise of The Less You Know, The Sounder You Sleep by Juliet Butler, a story about the true-life conjoined twins Masha and Dasha Krivoshlyapova. It spans the course of their full lives from 1950 to 2003, living in various institutions in Moscow. The difficulty of constant contact between the two sisters is compounded by the deep differences in their personalities. It’s actually almost a textbook abusive relationship, with Masha showing genuine signs of psychopathy – volatility, violence, charm and lack of empathy – and Dasha bearing the deep sensitivity, sadness and passivity of ...

Earlier in the year, I read Mary Roach’s Gulp - a fascinating and hilarious journey down the alimentary canal. When picking up Giulia Enders’ Gut , I worried that I might be over-gutted. What more could I possibly have to learn, having already read one other book? Fortunately, Ender’s bestseller couldn’t be a better companion piece to Roach’s. Where Gulp is a light-hearted set of the facts that she found most interesting, Gut goes and fills in more of the hard detail. Both are immensely readable, but the former is set to entertain, and the latter to inform. They complement perfectly. Enders (and let’s not forgo the cheap mention of nominative determinism here) makes you fall in love with the gut by being in love with it herself. Her passion and joy blast out of every sentence, and like so many things discussed within the book, that’s infectious. Sometimes the writing style feels slightly young, but I think that’s to make it engaging to a wide audience, and is easily over...

Ghosts don’t exist. There’s lots of evidence we can use to support that position – where are the black and Indian ghosts in Britain? Poor people have always died in greater numbers and more tragic circumstances, why are ghosts usually of richer people? Why should the internal emotional state of someone as they die be able to externally determine whether or not they stay on and spook about? If they’re not bound by gravity, (seeing as they float about like intangible jellyfish), why do they appear on the spot on the Earth where they carked it, rather than somewhere in space, several million miles away, which is the actual geographical location that they died and from which the Earth has since tootled away? Ghosts are clearly a load of old ectoplasm. But that said, I do really like a good ghost story, and so does pretty much everyone else. Despite their non-existence, the universality of ghost stories tells us that they’re still meaningful to people even if they’re not real, like the e...

I don't generally read other reviews before I write my own, partly so that I don't bias my own, and partly so that I don't realise I've completely misinterpreted something and feel like Colonel Dummkopf, Grand Leader of the Shit-For-Brains. But a few negative reviews on Goodreads caught my eye, which I found surprising. I think The Three may have suffered for being classified as horror, when in fact it isn't - and if you opened it up expecting horror, I can understand your disappointment. To be clear, there are definitely creepy and horrific moments in here. It's not a light-hearted whimsical romp for children, like Winnie The Pooh or The Shining . But this is more about a grimly-winding tension that gets more unsettling as it goes on, precisely because it refuses to give you the answers you want. More than that, though, it's an exploration of the destructive power of belief. A freak event occurs - four planes go down on the same day, three of ...

Margaret Atwood has got dystopian speculative fiction down . She probably gets up in the morning and chomps on a huge bowl of Dystopios, washed down with a hot cup of speculation. In fact, she's got it so down that in The Heart Goes Last , one of her more recent offerings, the premise feels almost throwaway. It's not that it's not fully-considered, or incomplete - Atwood's world-building is as jam-hot as it ever was. It's more that it feels like she can slot it together with such ease that shocking elements don't even shock her anymore. There's real darkness in this story, but the tone across the book is much lighter than on some of her other works, and that can serve to jar a little. The premise is that society has crumbled (natch) and an authoritarian new semi-socialist system has arisen to combat the cultural rot ( mais oui ). In this, people spend half their lives voluntarily in prison (A.K.A. Positron), and the other half out of it (in Consi...

Across the course of this challenge, I’ve tended to pick authors whom I know are well-respected, or books that have sat on my ‘to read’ list endlessly, gathering dust and weeping like abandoned children. So when I saw Karen Russell’s Vampires in the Lemon Grove winking at me, a book I’ve never heard of by an author I’ve never heard of, but with a frankly excellent title, I thought Are you Abba? Because I’m gonna take a chance on you. I’m delighted that I did. VITLG is a book of short stories, each of which follows a similar form: there’s a weird idea that forms the crux of the plot, and then Russell sets about making it feel fleshed out with believable characters. It would be wrong to call this surrealism, because there’s generally only a single oddity in each story. But it’s also not quite magic realism. It’s somewhere in-between. Or if it is magic realism, it’s 90% realism and 10% magic. It’s on the Murakami road. Let’s be exemplokleptomaniacs and take an example: in on...