July’s edition of BR3AKTHRU Magazine’s MadCon Book Corner is finally here! This month’s includes reviews of 127 Hours: Between A Rock And A Hard Place by Aron Ralston and The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.
Details of August’s books have already featured on the Poetic Rage Facebook page, usually along with other exclusives linked to both blog and BR3AKTHRU developments, but as I am going camping tomorrow that will not continue over the next week.
BR3AKTHRU’s MadCon Book Corner – June
Here is the link for June’s edition of BR3AKTHRU Magazine’s MadCon Book Corner, including reviews of Bark: Stories by Lorrie Moore and Under The Skin by Michel Faber.
Details of July’s books will feature on the Poetic Rage Facebook page later this month, along with other exclusives linked to both blog and BR3AKTHRU developments.
Here is my review for The Secret (compiled) by Rhonda Byrne on Goodreads:
The Secret is an interesting read; although I do not entirely agree with/believe in its ideology, I respect its revolutionary method of rooting positivity into modern society’s bleak, depressive complacency. No, unlike some people who will have read this book or seen the film, I do not view this ideology as scripture, but it is very easy to read and puts across some very interesting ideas. The Secret causes you to reflect back onto life-defining moments, and can actually make a lot of sense if you attempt to focus on its practice. But does The Secret actually encourage laziness and complacency? Just thinking about things does not actually get them done (this is the main principle of the ideology), but I do believe that what The Secret is really telling us is that thoughts become activity, which is true. The emotions we feel become the actions we take.
The view towards illness in this book annoyed me. Telling someone who is depressed to ‘think happy thoughts, and your problems will go away’ is a very naïve piece of healing advice. That is exactly what depression is, when you can’t ‘think happy thoughts’, which is what makes the illness so destructive and horrible for the victim and those living around them. Giving such advice to someone suffering from depression will rarely have any positive kind of effect.
I also found it frustrating how Rhonda Byrne (Australian) only managed to find two teachers who weren’t American, compared to about the other twenty who all were. For a Secret that is boasted to be so prosperous around the globe, why are all the people who know about it Americans, or living in the US? I felt this cheapened The Secret, not because the teachers were American, but because there wasn’t a variety of cultures across the planet shown to be using it in modern day. However, still interesting and worth a read if you’re in desperate need of some inspiration. You never know, it might work for you.
Here is my review for When We Were Bad by Charlotte Mendelson on Goodreads:
What Charlotte Mendelson achieves with her great skill of writing, she loses through her storytelling. I struggled with When We Were Bad to begin with, because I just found it so confusing. With so many different characters being initially thrown at you, I had a real difficulty in remembering who was who. As soon as I was around 100 pages in, I had managed to achieve a firm grasp over who all the characters were, but introducing so many right from the beginning made it difficult for me to divulge in.
About a Jewish family, finding their devotion to each other increasingly difficult, the novel is a family-in-crisis kind of tale. It is written very well, and sentences flow into images without many problems, but as I stated before it’s the storytelling that makes it so frustrating.
A family who values truth, so infected by its own hypocrisy that the frustration boils inside you as you want to scream at the world and ask people why they don’t just talk to each other: this was very well portrayed. Each family member’s pretty, (and generally inconsequential) dirty little secrets gradually erode the family’s ‘firm’ structure, not because of its content but because of the fact that they are kept secrets. The character of Jonathan is another example of Mendelson’s literary talent; he is supposed to be hopelessly boring, and he is certainly viewed that way. The structure of his vocabulary is ingeniously designed to allude to that conclusion. He is the definition of a Daily Mail reader.
One point near the end of the book, there was a bit I didn’t quite understand (even though it was a major part of the climax), but I understand its inclusion did make sense as it was deeply rooted in the character shown by previous developments.
The book has a helpful glossary full of Jewish words that are used in the novel in order to help readers unfamiliar with such terms reach a better understanding of the character’s lives, while still using realism as a tool. Annoyingly there were a few gaps in this glossary, and as I would turn to the back of the book to find out what secrets this foreign-looking word was hiding, I would swiftly become bitterly disappointed, resorting to the distractions of my laptop instead. If you’re going to have a glossary, why wouldn’t you be thorough?
Although I may not have liked this book much, I respect Charlotte Mendelson’s talent as a writer, but her skill of literature is not as much to my taste.
You can view all my reviews and ratings on Goodreads by clicking here, or by adding me on the book social networking site.
Here is my review for Stuart: A Life Backwards by Alexander Masters on Goodreads:
Stuart Shorter was an ex-junkie, (ex-)psychopath, ex-homeless, and relatively unknown in the grand scheme of things. Yet Alexander Masters was still entirely correct in thinking that Stuart’s story was a story worth telling. With the bizarre structure of starting the book at the end of the story, which isn’t actually as confusing as it sounds, the reader is sent on a journey through the life of a chaotic in the heart of Cambridge, England. For so many horrific things that have taken place at Stuart’s fault in his tragically short life, this nightmare of a man really does begin to grow on you. Masters has truly mastered the art of emphasising the tragedy of one’s past at the same time as filling the pages with his own realistic, yet humourous reactions to Stuart’s difficult behaviour.
One thing didn’t work for me, however. Near the end of the book we get to Stuart’s early years with a chapter titled ‘The Forgotten Years: Aged 0-10’ which made no sense to me. The irony of the chapter’s title is very apparent because it seems as if they really are forgotten. Masters visits Stuart’s grandmother to try and find out about the beginning of his life, but we don’t actually find out anything near the sort. It’s not even made clear if those years really are forgotten by the last few who had a chance of remembering them, or if Master’s made a mistake. Intentional irony or not, I didn’t like that.
Stuart: A Life Backwards is a truly brilliant debut from Alexander Masters. With heartfelt sorrow and ironic humour plastered throughout, this book really was an enjoyable read, despite the confusion around ‘The Forgotten Years’.
Stuart Shorter
Here is my review for The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford on Goodreads:
The Good Soldier is an intense tale of the complexity of post-Victorian emotional repression. With a collection of entirely despicable characters, it is somewhat refreshing to know that we live in a society that is somewhat openly over-sexualised, instead of in the hellhole of despair that existed in the early 1900s that was under-sexualised, and therefore even more liable to befall upon adultery and deceit in an explosion of desperation for passionate exposure. Ford Madox Ford certainly has a way with words; his beautiful choice of linguistic devices and upper class vernacular exposes the reality behind this harrowing ‘inspired-by-true-events’ account. The problems with it are that sometimes the novel is simply too complex. Although the narrator does recognise this, and he perfectly justifies his reasoning for the use of this peculiar technique of story telling; the events seem to ‘to-and-fro’ between dates and characters, which sometimes begin to twist the story down a path of amnesiac nonsense. With one sentence being set in a certain time, and another being set in an event that took place a few years before, this twisting path of confusion dwells more in a forest of misunderstood mist than in an open field of appreciated clarity. Nevertheless, The Good Soldier is a beautifully written novel (one feels most elegant to read it), and where it falls on, perhaps, context, it rises and succeeds with its literacy.
You can view all my reviews on Goodreads by clicking here, or by adding me on the book social networking site.
Here is my review for Doctor Sleep by Stephen King on Goodreads:
I couldn’t put this book down; Doctor Sleep is an excellent sequel to the Shining, as well as being a perfectly good book in its own right (something pretty unheard of recently). King is one of my favourite authors and I had been looking forward to reading the novel for a very long time. I was certainly not disappointed. The master of written suspense has certainly not lost his title, or his ranking on my list of favourite authors. In fact this book is so good that I may even prefer it to the The Shining (my favourite book, after my all-time-favourite The Knife of Never Letting Go and its sequels by Patrick Ness). Now this could be because I really enjoyed seeing the character of Danny Torrance grown up, or it could be because it is set in the modern age that I am so familiar with living in myself, unlike the original, therefore the literature could consume me more. But in all truth, I highly doubt that possibility as it’s never been a problem with such masterpieces as The Jungle Book, Dracula, or Olalla. The novel succeeded in making my spine tingle, as well as making me cry at some point too. Which I did NOT expect from a Stephen King novel. I knew hew was capable of provoking powerful emotions, but seriously? Crying? A fantastic read, King fans will not be disappointed.
Check out my review for The Fault in Our Stars by John Green on Goodreads:
The Fault in Our Stars is incredibly powerful; through its dry wit, sarcastic soliloquies and heartbreaking honesty the reader is sent through a roller coaster ride of emotions. I finished this book in less than a day of reading because it hooked me from its start. It’s one of those books that, despite being written with the target audience of young adults, is easily suitable for adults, alike. The chapters flow into each other with perfected precision, and imagery, when used, has a real effect in placing yourself within the story. John Green has certainly created a novel that will be much-loved for years too come for (once again) teenagers and adults, alike. I look forward to the film coming out this summer.
Check out my review for Actors Anonymous by James Franco on Goodreads:
Conversely to most of these reviews, I actually enjoyed this book and it certainly is not thematic garbage. Although it isn’t perfect (a couple of the chapters really did annoy me, and a few others greatly confused me); I could really feel the passion that Franco put into the honesty of his characters, and it showed in the final product. I don’t know why he’s called it a novel, because it’s not. But this is a good and recommendable artistic piece of fiction about actors, ‘The Actor’, and general Hollywood and show business’ ethos and attitudes. Plus, some of it is just so damn quotable. It’s refreshingly different from almost all modern fiction released now, which is nice to see that someone is taking a bold step into the unknown: he’s definitely the right person for the job.
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