If I didn't love books _ I read more than 100 a year _ I wouldn't be a professional reviewer. Over 40 years, 4,000 plus perused. Compared to the 4 million books in the public library perhaps not a drop in the bucket, but a small puddle.
The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe 340pp, 2013 Two Roads Available at Asia Books and leading bookshops 350 baht
During those decades, I've read classics and popular books. I think of those as stories, with and without messages. Often as not it's the subject matter rather than the storyteller laying it out that moves, angers, depresses, lifts my spirits, gives me food for thought.
Yet the use of language, dialogue, characters, plot manipulation, descriptions of actual or imagined events, can't be over-estimated. I have favourite books and accept that they are not the same as those of other avid readers. which doesn't make my selection better than theirs. By the same token, theirs isn't right and mine wrong.
In The End Of Your Life Book Club under review, publisher Will Schwalbe lists and explains his choices, with a brief synopsis and quotes. However, this book has two functions. The other is a eulogy for his mother ("my mom" throughout). Mary Anne ran a book club in her home, also lecturing at Harvard and Radcliffe.
In her later years she was diagnosed as having cancer and Will devotes chapters to mom treatment in New York's top hospitals. Still, he makes certain that the books, mainly her impressions of them, get as much space as her ailment.
The good son leaves us in no doubt that mom was a household name far and wide. Even President Barack Obama sends her a get-well note. (She recommends his book.)
This reviewer regards the seven-page appendix list of must-read books, plays and poetry as a mixed bag. It contains Zelda Fitzgerald, but not Earnest Hemingway. The Nancy Drew series, but not Tolstoy. Mark Twain is flagrantly omitted. As are Victor Hugo, Dumas, de Maupassant, Robert Louis Stevenson. Not to mention Kipling, Wilde, Orwell and a host of others. But he does have the Bible, the teachings of the Buddha, Dante, Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, Christie, Eliot and Fleming. Either we are told to read particular works, or everything they've written.
My favourite/saddest "dying" book is John Gunther's Death Be Not Proud about his son. My question is, do you want to read about mom's tumours and operations or about great, and not so great, literature? They don't mesh.
Revenger by Tom Cain 476pp, 2013 Corgi Available at Asia Books and leading bookshops 325 baht
On the run
In the back of our minds _ not too far back _ is that we are not long for this world. Apart from the dangers facing us individually, there are those threatening mankind. Earth is vulnerable. Tsunami and pandemic, global warming and food shortage, overpopulation and war.
Chicken Little was afraid that the sky was falling. Authors and screenwriters expound on this with invasions by hostile aliens and creatures from the depth of Earth and sea. And more likely economic collapse. At least as bad as the Great Depression of 1929. Ending in America with the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, those alive today who survived it shudder at the memory of those dozen years. Factories closed, businesses went bankrupt. With no income to pay the rent families were evicted and communities of hobo tents sprang up. Husbands, fathers, sons fought to be selected for daily labour.
In Revenger by British scribe Tom Cain, set in 2011, another Great Depression is taking place. The poorer countries are unable to pay their debts. The wealthier countries have run out of funds to bail them out. On top of which Iran's nuclear facilities have been blown up. The Muslim world rises up in anger against Israel and its Western supporters. In fact, it is a set-up. Israel was not responsible. The author spends 476 pages uncovering who the culprits are. It isn't the new United People's political party taking advantage of the situation to be elected into power. As expected, Russia's FSB (KGB) takes the opportunity to muddy the waters. Enter Cain's literary creation Sam Carver, carried over from previous novels. Ex-Royal Marines (a UK hero not of the SAS is unusual, indeed). Now a bodyguard, security adviser, hit man on special missions for M16. The reader is asked to believe that he just happens to witness the bombing of a crowded supermarket. Caught on camera leaving the scene, DI Keane takes it into her head that he's the bomber or one of the accomplices. On the run through the Smoke, the cops are hot on his trail while he is after the real nogoodniks.
Carver takes on Novak, a fiend if there ever was one, in a battle royal lasting a few chapters. The author revels in describing blood and guts. Carver gets his man but loses his girl. Can he reach France in a Cesna while the RAF is after him in Typhoon jets? Revenger has lots of twists and turns.
