Tuesday, May 3, 2011

March & April Bookclub

So... as per my life, things are running a little behind schedule.

3 months into my monthly book reviews and already I am falling behind with keeping the blog up to date.

March (and April) we had a lot going on; I started back at work and hubby is well and truly into his resettlement work. Also we had Avalon's birthday so I think reading AND blogging have fallen by the wayside.

Anyway, I am playing catch up so here are my reads for March and April.


I didn't know a lot about Jimmi's life before I strated the book; a few hit songs, Woodstock, living in London and an early death. Knowing what I did of his music, As a fan of his music I thought it would be an interesting read. I chose Cross's book as I have read his biography of Kurt Cobain's life and found it quite in-depth. Cross has a way of really getting to the heart and essesnce of his subject.

 But this time I was not as 'drawn in' as I was with 'Heavier than Heavan.'  I found it easy to put it down and forget about. It was well written but I think you would need to be a fan to really enjoy it.

Here is what others had to say:

Jimi Hendrix continues to fascinate, and sell huge quantities of albums, even 35 years after his death. Quite apart from his influence on musicians and fans, a large part of the appeal of his sensational life story lies in the thrill of the era whose values he came to stand for. The Sixties still exert a massive pull over pop culture and this is genuinely a book for anyone interested, not only in Hendrix but also in anything to do with the pop culture of the last 40 years.


Meticulously researched and sensitively and beautifully written, this is a labour of love that reveals the nuances, foibles and tragedies of the human being behind the iconic image.


This is the sweeping, authoritative and colourful biography that Jimi Hendrix deserves and that his legions of fans, young and old have been waiting for.

~***~


I just finished The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon.


The title The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (or the curious incident of the dog in the night-time as it appears within the book) is an appropriate one for Mark Haddon's ingenious novel both because of its reference to that most obsessive and fact-obsessed of detectives, Sherlock Holmes, and because its lower-case letters indicate something important about its narrator.

Christopher is an intelligent youth who lives in the functional hinterland of autism--every day is an investigation for him because of all the aspects of human life that he does not quite get. When the dog next door is killed with a garden fork, Christopher becomes quietly persistent in his desire to find out what has happened and tugs away at the world around him until a lot of secrets unravel messily.
 
Haddon makes an intelligent stab at how it feels to, for example, not know how to read the faces of the people around you, to be perpetually spooked by certain colours and certain levels of noise, to hate being touched to the point of violent reaction. Life is difficult for the difficult and prickly Christopher in ways that he only partly understands; this avoids most of the obvious pitfalls of novels about disability because it demands that we respect--perhaps admire--him rather than pity him.
--Roz Kaveney

I really enjoyed Haddon's book. It was new and fresh to write from Christopher's perspective and to see his world through such a literal sense. I recommend to anyone looking for a light read.

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