Quote of the day

"Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it... All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children."

- George Orwell, 1984, Book 1, Chapter 2

Quote of the day

"Because, if one is writing novels today, concentrating on the beauty of the prose is right up there with concentrating on your semi-colons, for wasted effort."

Neil Gaiman

The Booker Prize longlist is out!

Here are the nominees (courtesy of Kalahari.net):

The Children’s Book
A.S. Byatt
This vivid, rich and moving saga is played out against the great, rippling tides of the day, taking us from the Kent marshes to Paris and Munich and the trenches of the Somme. Born at the end of the Victorian era, growing up in the golden summers of Edwardian times, a whole generation grew up unaware of the darkness ahead.

Summertime
J.M. Coetzee
A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. He plans to focus on the years from 1972-1977 when Coetzee, in his thirties, is sharing a run-down cottage in the suburbs of Cape Town with his widowed father. This, the biographer senses, is the period when he was 'finding his feet as a writer'. Never having met Coetzee, he embarks on a series of interviews with people who were important to him - a married woman with whom he had an affair, his favourite cousin Margot, a Brazilian dancer whose daughter had English lessons with him, former friends and colleagues. From their testimony emerges a portrait of the young Coetzee as an awkward, bookish individual with little talent for opening himself to others. Within the family he is regarded as an outsider, someone who tried to flee the tribe and has now returned, chastened. His insistence on doing manual work, his long hair and beard, rumours that he writes poetry evoke nothing but suspicion in the South Africa of the time. Sometimes heartbreaking, often very funny, Summertime shows us a great writer as he limbers up for his task. It completes the majestic trilogy of fictionalised memoir begun with Boyhood and Youth .

The Quickening Maze
Adam Foulds
Based on real events in Epping Forest on the edge of London around 1840, The Quickening Maze centres on the first incarceration of the great nature poet John Clare. After years struggling with alcohol, critical neglect and depression, Clare finds himself in High Beach Private Asylum - an institution run on reformist principles which would later become known as occupational therapy. At the same time another poet, the young Alfred Tennyson, moves nearby and becomes entangled in the life and catastrophic schemes of the asylum's owner, the peculiar, charismatic Dr Matthew Allen. For John Clare, a man who had grown up steeped in the freedoms and exhilarations of nature, who thought 'the edge of the world was a day's walk away', a locked door is a kind of death. This intensely lyrical novel describes his vertiginous fall, through hallucinatory episodes of insanity and dissolving identity, towards his final madness. Historically accurate, but brilliantly imagined, the closed world of High Beach and its various inmates - the doctor, his lonely daughter in love with Tennyson, the brutish staff and John Clare himself - are brought vividly to life. Outside the walls is Nature, and Clare's paradise: the birds and animals, the gypsies living in the forest; his dream of home, of redemption, of escape. Rapturous yet precise, exquisitely written, rich in character and detail, this is a remarkable and deeply affecting book: a visionary novel which contains a world.

How To Paint A Dead Man
Sarah Hall
Italy in the early 1960s: a dying painter considers the sacrifices and losses that have made him an enigma, both to strangers and those closest to him. He begins his last life painting, using the same objects he has painted obsessively for his entire career - a small group of bottles. In Cumbria 30 years later, a landscape artist - and admirer of the Italian recluse - finds himself trapped in the extreme terrain that has made him famous. And in present-day London, his daughter, an art curator struggling with the sudden loss of her twin brother while trying to curate an exhibition about the lives of the twentieth-century European masters, is drawn into a world of darkness and sexual abandon. Covering half a century, this is a luminous and searching novel, and Hall's most accomplished work to date.


The Wilderness
Samantha Harvey
It's Jake's birthday. He is sitting in a small plane, being flown over the landscape that has been the backdrop to his life - his childhood, his marriage, his work, his passions. Now he is in his early sixties, and he isn't quite the man he used to be. He has lost his wife, his son is in prison, and he is about to lose his past. Jake has Alzheimer's. As the disease takes hold of him, Jake struggles to hold on to his personal story, to his memories and identity, but they become increasingly elusive and unreliable. What happened to his daughter? Is she alive, or long dead? And why exactly is his son in prison? What went so wrong in his life? There was a cherry tree once, and a yellow dress, but what exactly do they mean? As Jake, assisted by 'poor Eleanor', a childhood friend with whom for some unfathomable reason he seems to be sleeping, fights the inevitable dying of the light, the key events of his life keep changing as he tries to grasp them, and what until recently seemed solid fact is melting into surreal dreams or nightmarish imaginings. Is there anything he'll be able to salvage from the wreckage? Beauty, perhaps, the memory of love, or nothing at all?

Wolf Hall
Hilary Mantel
In the ruthless arena of King Henry VIII's court, only one man dares to gamble his life to win the king's favor and ascend to the heights of political power
England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. The quest for the king's freedom destroys his adviser, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum.
Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell is a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people and a demon of energy: he is also a consummate politician, hardened by his personal losses, implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph?

The Glass Room
Simon Mawer
The precisions of science, the wild variance of lust, the catharsis of confession and the fear of failure - these are things that happen in the Glass Room. High on a Czechoslovak hill, the Landauer House shines as a wonder of steel and glass and onyx built specially for newlyweds Viktor and Liesel Landauer, a Jew married to a gentile. But the radiant honesty of 1930 that the house, with its unique Glass Room, seems to engender quickly tarnishes as the storm clouds of WW2 gather, and eventually the family must flee, accompanied by Viktor's lover and her child. But the house's story is far from over, and as it passes from hand to hand, from Czech to Russian, both the best and the worst of the history of Eastern Europe becomes somehow embodied and perhaps emboldened within the beautiful and austere surfaces and planes so carefully designed, until events come full-circle.

Not Untrue and Not Unkind
Ed O’Loughlin
In Dublin, a newspaper editor called Cartwright is found dead. One of his colleagues, Owen Simmons, discovers a dossier on Cartwright's desk. And in the dossier Owen finds a photograph, which brings him back to a dusty road in Africa and to the woman he once loved. Not Untrue and Not Unkind is Owen's story - a gripping story of friendship, rivalry and betrayal amongst a group of journalists and photographers covering Africa's wars. It is an astonishingly powerful and accomplished debut that immediately establishes Ed O'Loughlin as a mature master of the novel form.

Me Cheeta: the Autobiography
Cheeta
The incredible, and moving true story of Cheeta the Chimp, star of countless Hollywood blockbusters, told in his own words The greatest Hollywood Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller, died in 1984. His coffin was lowered into the ground to the recorded sounds of his famous jungle call. Maureen O'Sullivan, his Jane, died in 1998. Weissmuller's son, who first played Boy in the 1939 film Tarzan finds a Mate, has gone too. But Cheeta the Chimp, who starred with them all, is alive and well, retired in Palm Springs. At the incredible age of seventy-five, he is by far the oldest living chimpanzee ever recorded.

Brooklyn
Colm Toibin
Hauntingly beautiful and heartbreaking, Colm Toibin's sixth novel, Brooklyn, is set in Brooklyn and Ireland in the early 1950s, when one young woman crosses the ocean to make a new life for herself.
Eilis Lacey has come of age in small-town Ireland in the years following World War Two. Though skilled at bookkeeping, she cannot find a job in the miserable Irish economy. When an Irish priest from Brooklyn to sponsor Eilis in America -- to live and work in a Brooklyn neighborhood just like Ireland -- she decides she must go, leaving her fragile mother and her charismatic sister behind.


Love and Summer
William Trevor
No information available

Looking ahead to next week...

Next week's featured author is Tahir Shah, compulsive traveller, adventurer and writer. If you haven't read his books yet, you need to. We're looking forward to reviewing his books next week and hopefully doing an interview with him, schedule permitting.

Watch this space...

Review: the Bicentennial Man

The Bicentennial Man is a collection of short stories by this week’s featured author, Isaac Asimov. The title story is about a robot who is given the name Andrew Martin after the family he works for. Andrew discovers he has extraordinary artistic talents and as the decades pass by Andrew begins to fight for what he believes are his rights; to own money and property and to become emancipated from his owner. After tremendous legal battles, he is finally declared legally human.

This book raises many questions about artificial intelligence which may become more and more relevant as time progresses. If mankind creates an intelligence which becomes superior to his own, should they ever be given freedom and rights? Asimov delivers thought-provoking insight into a potential future challenge.

Quote of the day

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing. ~ Harper Lee

Featured author - did you know?

Here are some random and totally useless facts about this week’s featured author, Isaac Asimov:

- Asimov died on the 6th April 1992 of heart and kidney failure. When his biography was published ten years later, it was revealed that Asimov had been living with HIV contracted from a blood transfusion performed during his December 1983 triple-bypass surgery.

- The famous and celebrated writer, whose science-fiction novels often described space travel, himself had an irrational fear of flying, which severely limited his ability to travel throughout most of his life.

- Asimov was a teetotaler in his later years.

- He was completely inept at any activity that required motor skills – he never learned to swim or ride a bicycle.

- When he was in the army as a young man he achieved the highest score in his company’s intelligence test, although he got the lowest score in the physical-conditioning test.

Quote of the day

A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.

~ Charles Lamb, Last Essays of Elia, 1833

Review: The Foundation series

The winner of the once-off Hugo Award for “Best All-Time Series” in 1966, the Foundation series of books have had a profound impact on the world of science fiction. Originally written as a trilogy (Foundation, Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation) in the 1950s, Asimov’s publishers pressured him to write a sequel, resulting in Foundation’s Edge being published in 1982, followed soon after by Foundation and Earth, Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation.

The main concept surrounding the series is the belief by scientist Hari Seldon that the future of the Galactic civilisation could be determined by applying a mathematical principle he had developed called psychohistory. The principle of the theory is that the behaviour of a large mass of people can be predicted using the law of mass action. Seldon uses psychohistory to predict the decay and collapse of the Galactic Empire, and contrives a plan whereby the resulting anarchy and barbarism would be limited to a thousand years before the rise of a new central civilisation, instead of thirty thousand years.

Seldon establishes two Foundations at opposite ends of the Galaxy, the first a repository of all human knowledge, where the inhabitants of the planet Terminus are working on creating a galactic Encyclopaedia and are initially unaware of Seldon’s plan or of the existence of the Second Foundation.

How the Foundation responds in times of crisis is the test for Seldon’s theory of psychohistory, and each successive leader of the planet Terminus has critical challenges to meet. Eventually the leadership of the First Foundation slides into decay and dictatorship, and Seldon’s plan is challenged by an unpredicted variable, the rise of a galactic conqueror, known as the Mule, who is able to control others by his mutated telepathic abilities. He topples the Foundation and Seldon’s plan hangs by a thread. The Second Foundation, a clandestine group with empathetic powers, acts to set the Galaxy back on par with the Plan. Further on in the series, the search for the Second Foundation intensifies and the involvement of robots is eventually revealed.

The prequels delve into Hari Seldon’s efforts to set up the two Foundations at the beginning of the decline of the Galactic Empire and his relationship with the oldest humanoid robot in the Galaxy.

It is worth noting that that this series beat the Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien to receive the special Hugo Award for Best All-Time Series. Asimov’s plots and scientific theories are gripping, enthralling and intriguing and this series is easily his best and most inventive work.

Featured Author Quotation - Isaac Asimov

[In response to this question by Bill Moyers: What do you see happening to the idea of dignity to human species if this population growth continues at its present rate?] "It's going to destroy it all. I use what I call my bathroom metaphor. If two people live in an apartment, and there are two bathrooms, then both have what I call freedom of the bathroom, go to the bathroom any time you want, and stay as long as you want to for whatever you need. And this to my way is ideal. And everyone believes in the freedom of the bathroom. It should be right there in the Constitution. But if you have 20 people in the apartment and two bathrooms, no matter how much every person believes in freedom of the bathroom, there is no such thing. You have to set up, you have to set up times for each person, you have to bang at the door, aren't you through yet, and so on. And in the same way, democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people onto the world, the value of life not only declines, but it disappears. It doesn't matter if someone dies."

- Interview by Bill Moyers on A World Of Ideas.

This week's featured author - Isaac Asimov

One of the most famous science-fiction authors of all time, Isaac Asimov was a prolific writer, penning hundreds of books in a wide variety of different categories as well as numerous short stories. Asimov was also a professor of biochemistry, writing a great many popular science text books and other works of non-fiction.

His most popular science-fiction works included the spectacular Foundation, Robot and Empire series, altogether spanning 15 novels and dozens of short stories. Asimov was known for his fascination with the relationship between man and machine, which spawned countless short stories and novels on the subject of robots and the exploration of the recurring concept of the Laws of Robotics throughout a number of his science-fiction works. He is responsible for coining the word robotics, as well as the less widely used positronic and psychohistory.

Asimov’s writing is strangely stark, with minimal emphasis on main characters or settings and a lack of philosophical ramblings. This skin-and-bones style ensured Asimov wrote solely on the strength of the actual plot and not on florid frills.
Asimov’s scientific theories are so profound that one cannot help but be carried away by the sheer invincibility and solidity of his storylines.

Isaac Asimov died in New York, on the 6th of April 1992 at the age of 72, leaving behind a legacy that can scarcely be challenged by contemporary writers.

Quote of the day

A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man's mind can get both provocation and privacy. ~ Edward P. Morgan