#52. Published in 2024 – The Book That Broke The World by Mark Lawrence (Hardback)

If I struggled with some categories in this challenge, this was the one where I immediately knew what I was going to read. 

In 2023 I had a big birthday. One of the things I did during the year was go for a personalised shopping experience with friends…complete with champagne. I’m not normally a lover of shopping, I hate traipsing around clothes racks, so this was the perfect way to shop…get someone else to do the donkey work for you! Once finished, and arms aching with carrier bags, we went past Waterstones. Now there is one type of shop I don’t mind spending hours in, so we popped in and I was captivated by a book called “The Book That Wouldn’t Burn. I’m not normally a lover of the Sci-Fi or Fantasy genres, but there was something about the cover and title which captivated me. I took the book on holiday and loved every minute of it, and I couldn’t wait for the second book in this gripping trilogy. Cue 2024 when Book #2 was released!

“We fight for the people we love. We fight for the ideas we want to be true.

Evar and Livira stand side by side and yet far beyond each other's reach. Evar is forced to flee the library, driven before an implacable foe. Livira, trapped in a ghost world, has to recover her book if she's to return to her life. While Evar's journey leads him outside into the vastness of a world he's never seen, Livira's destination lies deep inside her own writing, where she must wrestle with her stories in order to reclaim the volume in which they were written.

And all the while, the library quietly weaves thread to thread, bringing the scattered elements of Livira's old life – friends and foe alike – back together beneath new skies.

Long ago, a lie was told, and with the passing years it has grown and spread, a small push leading to a chain of desperate consequences. Now, as one edifice topples into the next with ever-growing violence, it threatens to break the world. The secret war that defines the library has chosen its champions and set them on the board. The time has come when they must fight for what they believe, or lose everything.”

I pre-ordered The Book That Broke the World, then I wondered if I was going to be disappointed with the sequel. So often a sequel lets you down, it doesn’t live up to expectations. If I’m honest, I can’t say whether this book is better or worse than the first. It’s a bit different. It’s like trying to compare apples with pears. The first book is very much character led. At 559 pages, it has the scope to bring the reader into this different world inhabited by different characters. You learn about this strange world set in an infinite library, about characters of different races in different times and it is completely engrossing. In book #2, we know so much about the main characters, that the story needs to take a bit of a different direction. 

What I loved about this book was "The Story So Far" section, which served as a brilliant reminder of what had happened in the first book. I wish more authors would do this. If I’m reading a series of books, I get so annoyed if the author diverges from the flow of the story to issue long rambling reminders of what has previously happened to their characters (J K Rowling take note!)

Mark Lawrence's The Book That Broke The World is the second book in the author's "Library Trilogy", and whilst it continues to follow Evar and Livera’s story, a new perspective is introduced in the form of a slave called Celcha and her brother. As her character arc grows, we see how her story weaves into the lives of Evar and Livera. 

#36. Has Futuristic Technology – In Our Likeness by Bryan Vandyke (Kindle)

It is strange to think that the science fiction of yesteryear seemed so unattainable. It really was the work of imaginative writers which made us think one day people would drive electric cars. It sometimes seems that if a writer can imagine it, then a person of science can try to make it happen.

There is a unique bond forged between art and science that so many people overlook. Those who scorn arts students for wasting tax payers money on "purposeless courses" (including governments) should consider how inextricably linked these seemingly opposite facets are.

The idea of Artificial Intelligence was once unthinkable, but now it surrounds us. Your smart phone can make a quick doodle look like a piece of art. If you're stuck writing a presentation it will write something for you. In some respects, it is current technology, however, it is not without its flaws. There are little giveaways that show when work wasn't written or drawn by a human hand. AI is still futuristic technology, so when this book surfaced in my choices for August's 2024 Amazon Prime read, I thought I would take a chance on it.

 

“Graham Gooding is a leader at a tech start-up when his brilliant coworker—and work crush—Nessie Locke asks for help testing a new algorithm. Graham jumps at the chance to impress her, and to improve his floundering personal life. He soon discovers that the algo is more powerful than Nessie—or anyone—realizes. It was built to detect lies on the internet, but when Graham makes a small edit to Nessie’s online profile, hoping to see if the program will catch the lie, Nessie changes in real life. The algo can alter the real world. Now, so can Graham.

 

No one knows what Graham has done, except his boss, enigmatic tech guru David Warwick. Graham is racked with guilt, but Warwick thrills to the possibilities of what they can do next. This promises to be the innovation that will make Warwick a household name. Drawn by the power of the algo but terrified by its potential for chaos, Graham must decide what to do and whom to trust in a world where one true reality no longer exists.

 

As love, trust, memories, and what it means to be human begin to slip away, Graham and Nessie work together to restore the past—before it’s lost to the anarchy of a world without truth.”

 

Ordinarily, if I visit a bookshop, I don't tend to head off to the Sci-fi section; I don't know why because I've read some great books in that genre. This does not fall into the "great" category, but it is a short well-paced novel that I superficially enjoyed and I think others less familiar with Sci-fi would probably enjoy it too. Those who love their Sci-Fi? Well, I'm not too sure. The book had an interesting premise, but I suspect it could have been handled a bit better. When I finished the novel I thought I'd enjoyed it, and to an extent I did. I found it easy to read and I finished it over a weekend, but when I picked up my notes to write the review, I realised that there was a lot in the novel that rankled me.

Graham has developed an infatuation for his colleague Nessie, but he lacks any self-confidence and can't tell her his true feelings about her. Now this is fine, we all have moments of self-doubt and we may worry what people think about us, but I found Graham's rambling inner monologues about the matter moved him from shy and retiring to incel territory almost immediately. I didn't know what was creepier, Graham or the AI algorithm he started messing about with. Actually, I do know what was creepier; Graham tweaking Nessie's on-line profile to remove her tattoos and finding out they had suddenly disappeared in real life shocked me, but once he realised that his actions could change things physically in the real world, he continued to tinker with the program to see what else he could do to people. This was very disturbing and said a lot more about his character than the technology he was trialling.

#11. Title Starting With the Letter ‘K’ – The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley (Audible)

This is the fourth book by Natasha Pulley that I have listened to, and then decided that it would have been better to have read a physical copy of the book. At some point, I may treat myself to the books, because I’m sure there are details that I’ve missed whilst walking and getting distracted by something I’ve seen. That is a shame really, because her books are full of such exquisite details, they deserve more attention than what I’ve given them.

 

“Joe Tournier has a bad case of amnesia. His first memory is of stepping off a train in the nineteenth-century French colony of England. The only clue Joe has about his identity is a century-old postcard of a Scottish lighthouse that arrives in London the same month he does. Written in illegal English—instead of French—the postcard is signed only with the letter “M,” but Joe is certain whoever wrote it knows him far better than he currently knows himself, and he's determined to find the writer. The search for M, though, will drive Joe from French-ruled London to rebel-owned Scotland and finally onto the battle ships of a lost empire's Royal Navy. In the process, Joe will remake history, and himself.”

 

Have you ever wondered what it would be like if the history you thought you knew was wrong? What if you were given the chance to go back in time and change events that have already happened? If you did change things, then the future as you know it wouldn’t be able to exist…you might not be able to exist; those you love now might not exist because of the changes you’ve made. It’s quite the deep soul-searching question, and one that comes to play out in this novel.

The first thing that I have to say about this book is that it is a slow burn, in fact all the novels I’ve read by Natasha Pulley are slow burns, which is why I think I would do better reading her books than trying to listen to them. That said, I don’t mean to suggest that the books are boring, rambling on about nothing, I mean that the story slowly unfurls. Pulley is a storyteller, she weaves a magical tale around “nothingness,” it is as though you can read several pages and still feel left in the dark, but you continue to read because you know, you know, that something interesting is being kept from you, it’s just ever so slightly out of reach, but with a bit of patience, the answer will come in its own time. At some point, everything you have been told will suddenly start to make sense.

The year is 1898 when Joe Tournier disembarks from a train in London into a world which is unfamiliar to both him and us the reader; only this isn’t London, it’s Londres. The UK is under French rule and slavery still seems to exist, somehow, the French won the Battle of Trafalgar, and the English are now slaves.

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami (Box Clever Challenge - April)

I am a HUGE fan of Haruki Murakami, and this lumbering great tome has been sat on my bookshelf for a while waiting for the right moment for me to give it the justice its 1318 pages deserve.

Murakami is well known for his strange cultish type stories, and this book, originally published in three volumes takes two cults head on in a disturbingly maddening story. The book focuses on two main characters, Tengo, a thirty year old former mathematical genius and Aomame (Green Peas) a thirty year old sports instructor and physical therapist.

Tengo shunned his child prodigy abilities and became a part time maths teacher. He embarked on a career in literature, and became the ghost writer of a teenagers story, "Air Chrysalis." The publisher of a literary company thought the story had the potential to win a prestigious literary competition, but the writing was flawed, if Tengo re-wrote the tale it could be entered into the competition. The teenager Fuka-Eri who wrote the story is a strange character, almost ethereal. She has no grasp of social convention, but her story is one which will create strange undercurrents to surface in the world of 1984.

The character Aomame is complex, she is more than just a sports instructor. She is a hired assassin to the strange Dowager, an elderly lady who has set up  a commune for victims of domestic abuse and who seeks her own type of justice in the world. And what kind of world is it? It is one where two cults show the darker side of the world. The Society of Witnesses, a Christian type sect, where its members refuse life saving surgery and knock door to door handing out pamphlets. A close knit community where if you do not follow the rules you are no longer welcome, you no longer exist in their society. Then there is Sakigake, a cult group with a mysterious "leader", of whom we hear disturbingly nasty stories about. Sakigake was innovative, they switched to organic farming which they could sell to affluent urbanites who would be happy to pay high prices for vegetables free from contamination, a highly cohesive group who are obsessed with secrecy. This secrecy is set to be undermined once Air Chrysalis is published and the darker side of the commune is about to be exposed.

"A man who finds joy in raping prepubescent girls, a powerfully built gay bodyguard, people who choose death over transfusion, a woman who kills herself with sleeping pills while six months pregnant, a woman who kills problematic men with a needle thrust to the back of the neck, men who hate women, women who hate men: how could it possibly profit the genes to have such people existing in this world?"

But what world are we living in? Aomame is living in 1984, and takes a seemingly normal taxi ride to a job. The taxi gets stuck in traffic, and whilst she sits listening to Janacek's Sinfonietta, her taxi driver warns her "Things are not what they seem." About to miss her appointment, Aomame is told to leave the taxi and take the emergency exit from the highway. Aomame climbs down a ladder and without realising it, suddenly finds herself in a world that looks just like 1984, but there are subtle differences, there are now two moons in the sky, and Aomame begins to realise that she has entered an alternate world. Those of us familiar with Murakami know that he writes about parallel dimensions which his characters subtlety slip through. Everyday occurrences suddenly transport them into another realm. Normally a man is searching for a woman he has lost (Wind Up Bird Chronicle), but in 1Q84, a mutual search is underway...a boy needs to find a girl, and a girl needs to find a boy.


Q is for "question mark"

"1Q84 - that's what I'll call this new world...Q is for "question mark". A world that bears a question." It is no surprise that there are elements of George Orwell's 1984 in this book. The dictator Big Brother is similar to Leader, but Big Brother has become too obvious, so now the Little People are who we need to look out for. It is not just George Orwell that Murakami steers us towards, Chekov, Dstoevsky, Lewis Carroll, Kubrick, Proust, Kafka, Macbeth, even Frazer's The Golden Bough is cited for us to read and learn from. There is also a reminiscence of Lovecraft's writing. "Some numbness remained, but the hand was certainly his. So, too, was the smell of sweat emanating from him, an oddly harsh odour like a zoo animal's." Murakami is a writer to elicit the best from all of your senses, you don't just read him, you can smell him, not literally, but the way he describes food cooking in such detail you can smell it cooking, and then taste it and savour all of its complex flavours. And it is this complexity that drives you onto reading the book, because essentially the story is very simple. It is a love story. A boy and girl were at school together and had a short mutual attraction, which despite spending years apart has played on their minds, and now they need one another, and events will lead them to start looking for each other, events that can happen in 1Q84, but not in 1984. The characters, as always, find themselves in a complicated maze that they need to figure out. Is this some kind of metaphor for the reader who struggles through the maze of day to day realities of life?

"The thing I'm most afraid of is me. Of not knowing what I'm going to do. Of not knowing what I am doing right now."

Whilst the novel is set in a fictitious world, the characters are very real. I like this about Murakami novels. The characters stay true, whilst the world around them becomes fake, but how like our real world is this? We sit everyday watching a fake world go by, never questioning, just accepting what we see in the news, what we hear politicians tell us, believing that a government would never lie to its people. We then find out that wars and atrocities have been committed under the cover of lies, that the politician have been deceiving us. Is our world really any more abstract than the world of Murakami's? And if this is true where does the problem lie? The only people that can change these things are us, but how many of us are too scared to do or say something? This is where we watch the bravery of the characters who have a goal, and will do anything to achieve that goal, and somehow we wish we could be just a little bit like them. This is where fiction and reality trade places again.

Good and bad are also tradeable entities, they continually switch places, there is never absolute good and absolute evil in the world, and we see this through the eyes of Murakami. A gentle and loving husband can seem like that to all of society, but to his wife he can be seen as a monster. She is the one that takes a beating and has to cover up the bruises, and this can be taken to any level. We let people see what we want them to see, we don't tell everyone the truth of what lies behind that closed door. "Our man did this," the dowager said. We've taken care of her three fractures, but one ear is exhibiting symptoms of hearing loss and may never be the same again." ... "We can't let anyone get away with doing this. We simply can't." But should we take the law into our own hands? Can we trust the world to help us out if we don't help ourselves out instead? In this strange world filled with maza's, dohta's and air chrysalis's the man may have raped a shadow, not a real entity, does this make his crime any better or any worse?

"The problem is not with me but with the world around me. It's not that my consciousness or mind has given rise to some abnormality, but rather that some kind of incomprehensible power has caused the world around me to change."

Once you have entered the world of Murakami it is difficult to leave. Once you find yourself transfixed by his writing you want more and more of the madness, you don't realise until it's too late that you've been sucked into the rabbit hole and there is no escape. Throughout the book we meet interesting people, we do not read the whole book through the eyes of Tengo and Aomame. The side character of Ushikawa is interesting and at times sad. The strange story of the NHK collector knocking on doors is an interesting side story, and it wouldn't be Murakami if cats did not feature somewhere! In this book we hear of the fable about the "Town of Cats". It is a story Edgar Allen Poe would be proud of and a place I certainly would not want to visit. Murakami's cats are not the soft cuddly variety! But all of the stories that seem incomprehensible on their own, when added together they start to make some sort of sense, but only if you try to look into the deeper meaning of things. I think many people disregard Murakami's writing because on the surface it seems trite and nonsensical, but take the time to try and understand him and his work will start to pay dividends. The world as you see it starts to change as you read, things you see as implausible suddenly seem to start making sense. That is what is clever about these types of novels, Murakami takes a plausible event, and twists it into something that could never happen, but it is not as far removed from reality as a science fiction story would be.

"It's very difficult to logically explain the illogical."

The book is a challenging read, it is after all 1318 pages long, and if I am honest, it could be shorter. We can't forget that this was written as three volumes, so perhaps in publishing it as one volume, cuts could have been made. Murakami has a repetitive streak, and there are lots of times that he has repeated concepts and the retelling of the story that the reader does not need. This slows the pace of the novel down, but I don't mind that. I like the Japanese sedate way of life that seems to slowly flow through the book. Nothing is rushed, and that is why I like reading, it is a chance to sit and relax and not rush.

I think for many readers, the fact that Murakami goes off on detailed tangents can be annoying, and maybe they are best sticking to his shorter quirkier novels. The narrative has been stretched out over the three books, but I like that. I want to feel that Tengo and Aomame's journey has taken the nine months of the book to progress through, I don't want to feel like the journey has been an easy one for either of them, it would detract from the point of the story, that they needed to search for each other.

I do however get a bit frustrated with some parts of the book that seem to be forgotten about. Whilst Murakami repeats large parts of the story, there are some things which don't get explained at all and in some instances they are disregarded. This is not the first time that I have read a Murakami novel and got a bit confused, but I think with a novel of this size, if you can find the time to reiterate parts of the story over and over, you could find the time to fill in a few blanks!

I therefore recommend this book to Murakami fans, and those who want to take on the challenge of an alternate reality. It is a long book, and I prefer some of his other shorter novels, but I do think that this epic novel will remain a firm classic with readers of this genre.

Genre: Fantasy, Magical Realism, Science Fiction, Japanese Lit,

Release Date: 19^th July 2012

Publisher: Vintage

Pages: 1318

 

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Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut (Box Clever Challenge - March)

I must confess, to my great shame, I know very little of American history or literature. Is Jailbird a classic novel? I'm not sure, that is for you to decide. Vonnegut, however, is a highly respected and one of the most influential American writers of the 20th century. His most famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five was inspired after he witnessed the Allied bombers destroy Dresden during WW2.

Despite Vonnegut being such an influential writer, I had not heard of him. I read the play Reasons to be Happy, by Neil LaBute because Tom Burke is starring in the stage play and I wanted to know what the story was about. In one of the scenes, Greg, the main character which Tom plays, is reading Jailbird by Vonnegut. I Googled the book and decided that this would make an ideal choice for my March read in the 2016 Classics Challenge!

Jailbird is a mixture of black comedy, satire and a potted history of the USA labour movement. Throughout the novel, the book shows the flaws in both political and corporate America and gives an insight into the differences of a capitalist and communist theory. The plot of Jailbird centres around someone who has been jailed for his minor involvement in the Watergate scandal. In what is essentially his memoir, Walter F Starbuck let's us know where he is in present day America, and then backtracks on his life, and what happened to him during his first two days of freedom when he has been released from jail.

The book interweaves fact and fiction in a subtle manner, and I'm sure that if I was better educated about the events happening in America at the time, I would have gained even more from the book than I did. That said, it gave me a great overview of society and the difficulties encountered between workers and employers. The Cuyahoga massacre is a fictitious event, but this clearly shows the violence between striking workforces and their bosses, and how the law was clearly on the side of the rich factory bosses. Whilst the story is a piece of fiction, it does draw similarities from the Morewood massacre in Pennsylvania in 1891. This sub story towards the start of the novel is an important one, it introduces us to the person who is responsible for influencing Walter's life as he grows up.

"all human beings were evil by nature, whether tormentors or victims, or the idle standers-by."

The novel is certainly a thought provoking one, and Vonnegut's style of writing is easy to follow and does not take itself too seriously. The book opens ones eyes to a corrupt society, the amount that humans are willing to put up with in their search for money and happiness. It is an insight into the the social and political challenges in America, and in fact shows the global issues which face us all. As the story continues, Walter mentions business after business, some of which are real, and how they are all bought up and eventually owned by the fictitious RAMJAC corporation. It shows how the little man cannot survive without some bulldozer coming in and snapping up the business, and ultimately ruining it!

It might be a pessimistic viewpoint to state that all humans are evil, but by degrees they are. Can the person who stands back and watches atrocities be any better than the man who carries them out? For a supposedly intelligent race, we often do not accomplish the things we should, or do the good that we intend to do. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The real life martyrdom of Sacco and Vanetti is a true piece of USA history and shows how immigrants could be treated at the time. They were Italian born USA immigrants, convicted of murders they claimed they did not commit. Well-known writers and authors petitioned for a pardon, but their cries were ignored. Both men were sent to the electric chair, despite a man called Celestino Madeiros confessing to the crime. 50 years after their deaths, a Massachusetts Governor would state that he had evidence that their trial had not been a fair one, but he declined to say if they were guilty or not.

"we are here for no purpose, unless we can invent one"

The book has many little sub-stories peppered throughout it, each one serving as a salutary lesson to the reader. One of the characters writes a book about a planet where the worst crime imaginable was ingratitude. The punishment? Defenestration. Prague lovers will know that this was the act of throwing people from windows and sparked The Thirty Years War! Even Einstein pops up to remark that "Life was fair." We might not think that life is fair, but if we reflect, life gives us countless opportunities, the question is, do we take them? And if we do take them, do we take the right opportunities? Quite frankly we can never know, not unless we are able to live a parallel life and see what would happen if we took those other opportunities...what we can't say with any truthfulness is that life is unfair. Life is just what you make of it.


"My nose, thank God, had conked out by then. Noses are merciful that way."

People like to think that money equates to happiness. It doesn't. Money may make life a little more comfortable, but in the same way it cannot buy style, it cannot buy happiness. Happiness comes from the soul, and the story of Mary Kathleen O'Looney, later to marry into the corporate world of RAMJAC to become Mrs Jack Graham, a woman in fear of her life, is a sad but poignant part of the tale. She transformed herself into an old, smelly bag lady, millions of pounds in the bank, but living in fear of her life in an old underground station and becoming just another non-entity on the street. If she was found she would have her hands cut off. The rest of her would not be required. Whoever had her hands, her fingerprints, had control of RAMJAC one of the largest corporations in the world.

This brings us back to the beginning of the book, a multimillionaire is friendless. He has an inability to interact with society, he has a wife who ignores him, a daughter who is embarrassed by him. All that wealth and he has to befriend the child of his cook so that he can teach him how to play chess, and thus keep the multimillionaire happy. The child would be Walter F Starbuck, a man who would get a job in a high powered company, which will lead to his downfall.

Back in Reality

A school in New York City was asked to write to their favourite authors to persuade them to do a talk at their school. Some students wrote to Vonnegut, who by then was 84 years old. He did not visit the school, but he did take the time to write a letter. The contents should be read and enacted up I think, It would certainly make people think a little before being so unpleasant to their fellow man. I will leave you with some words of wisdom in this regard from Vonnegut himself.



(With thanks to www.lettersofnote.com where the full and original post can be found)

Genre: Fiction, Classics, Humour, Literature, Science Fiction

Release Date: 1^st January 1992

Publisher: Vintage Books

Pages: 284

 

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