The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye: Five Fairy Stories – A S Byatt – 13.06.23

I watched the movie with Tilda Swinton ‘3000 Years of Longing’ and loved it, so I wanted to read the book (or short story) on which it was based. The other stories in the book are more traditional type fairy stories, but the Titular story, on which the movie was based is about a academic narratologist, Dr Gillian Perholt, who travels around the world speaking at conferences about the history of storytelling. She finds an old lamp in a antique shop in turkey and buys it not realising that it houses a genii (or djinn) (played gloriously by the lovely Idris Elba in the movie!) and that she is owed three wishes.

I’m glad that I watched the film and read the book so close to each other, because there were some things I preferred in the book, and others in the movie. In the book, there are some quite long passages which were talks given at the academic conferences and though sort of interesting, that were a bit over my head and I felt my attention waning. On the other hand, the ending in the film didn’t quite sit right, and I feel it is handled much better in the book.

I liked that Dr Perholt had always had imaginary friends, or seen things which no one else could see, which left open the interpretations between everything that happened in the story being real versus it all being in her head. I loved the tales that the djinn recounted about his past experiences and he seemed like a wise and good and deep feeling individual and I’m not at all surprised that Dr Perholt fell in love with him (especially looking like Idris Elba!). The way the story unfolded and the ending of the book was beautiful and tragic and inevitable. I loved it.

11.22.63 – Stephen King (AUDIOBOOK) – 08.06.23

I very much enjoyed listening to this audiobook! Loved the story, loved the narrator, I even loved the bit at the end where the author talks about writing the book!

I’m back from my recent trip to Japan and one of the things I brought back was a kit to make a miniature old fashioned Japanese sweet shop, and I added a second kit for a whole Japanese street from Amazon UK, so as well as listening to this book while out walking and running and enjoying the spell of lovely weather we’ve been having here in Belfast, I listened while cutting and sticking teeny tiny pieces of Japanese stuff together and had a very lovely time!

Anyhoo, back to the book!

11.22.63 is the date that Kennedy was shot and killed in America. The book is about a diner owner who discovers that the storeroom in his diner contains a kind of wormhole that you can walk through and arrive in 1959. He discovers that however long you spend in the past, when you return through the wormhole only two minutes have past in the present, and the next time you go back, you go to the same day in 1959 and any changes you might have made on your previous visit have been reset, as if you were never there.

A girl is accidentally shot in a hunting accident and paralysed during the time he is in the past so he goes back and tries to prevent her accident – he finds that he encounters many obstacles, as if something is trying to protect the timeline, but he does eventually manage to save her, and upon returning to the present, looks her up and she lived a full life without being paralysed. Of course every time he goes back he has to save her again or the timeline would just reset.

Then the diner owner decides he wants to prevent the Kennedy assassination.

He brings with him lots of sports results, so he can make a living through gambling and finds out all he can about Lee Harvey Oswald and other theories around the assassination and armed with this knowledge, goes back.

Unfortunately, he develops terminal cancer, and can’t stay in the past long enough to fulfil his mission, so he ropes in his friend, Jake Epping, a high school/adult education teacher, and Jake is the main character of the book – we follow him as he learns about the wormhole, experiences the past, has his own mission to fulfil, and his attempts to honour the request of his friend against growing opposition from whatever it is that is protecting the timeline.

I thought the book was fabulous – even though I don’t know that much about American history, I’ve seen enough American TV and Movies to get a lot of the references, and the story was great – human interest, love, moral dilemmas, mystery and intrigue, excitement, even some humour – I was gripped and enthralled.

I only realised after reading that there’s a tv adaptation (on Netflix or Amazon Prime I think) which I’ll have to check out.

Beyond the Wand: The Magic and Mayhem of Growing Up a Wizard – Tom Felton -07.06.23

I don’t like biographies (especially not ‘celebrity’ biographies) but my daughter, Becca, recommended this one, and I do love all things Potter, so I gave it a go.

Hmmm. I don’t know what to make of it. In some ways it’s nice to get a feel of what it was like to be a child actor in the Potter movie franchise, but in other ways it’s too much drawing back the veil and chasing away the magic with humdrum reality.

Tom Felton seems to be fairly honest and self-deprecating – he admits that he was cast because he was a cocky kid and a bit of a trouble-maker and therefor fitted Malfoy’s character, and I admit that it’s quite hard not to judge the actor at least a bit by the character he played. Like Malfoy, however, the real Tom Felton had insecurities and experiences that hurt and shaped him into a well rounded person with good and back qualities (like us all).

His life so far seems to have been a bit of a rollercoaster (to coin a phrase) but I genuinely hope after reading this that the rest of his life will be happy and fulfilling.

Meeting Mungo Thunk – Keith A. Pearson – 01.06.23

Like when I read Waiting In The Sky, by Keith Pearson (which I ultimately really liked) it took me a while to warm to this book, but like the characters, I as a reader went on a journey with the story, and at the end I thought it was a great book.

Adam was a normal enough child, until he read a strange old book one night and had terrible nightmares. Somehow after that he didn’t seem quite the same boy as he was before.

We meet him as an adult who makes poor choices and therefore his relationship breaks up and his life is pretty bad, until he meets Mungo Thunk.

Mungo Thunk moves in as Adam’s lodger and offers his services as a personal therapist. That’s when the characters’ redemption journeys begin and what a journey they go on – there is pain and self sacrifice and learning and some nice comeuppance for the bad guy. As I said, by the end of the book the writer had won me over and I will probably read more of his books.

Titanium Noir – Nick Harkaway (AUDIOBOOK) – 29.05.23

Angelmaker, and The Gone Away World, by Nick Harkaway, are among my favourite books ever, so I’m always excited by a new novel of his.

As I’ve mentioned in a few of my recent reviews, I travelled to Japan in May to visit my son, Danny who lives in Tokyo. To get from Ireland to Japan is a lot of travelling (between cars, flights, trains and time in airports, it took about 27 hours each way). I listened to this book while travelling, and therefore some of it at least hit my mind as a sort of lucid dream in my sleep deprived madness, and some bits I probably full on slept through since (in the first half of the book at least) I had several ‘hang on, what’s going on here? Who’s he again?’ kind of moments! So with that proviso, here’s my review:

Titanium Noir is both nostalgic and futuristic and manages to carry the two seamlessly together (as implied by the title!). It’s a murder mystery, and the investigator is invested (as is often the case) by more than just professional interest.

Set in a future where people who can afford it can be genetically enhanced – a procedure which can cure injury and some disease and also make the patient stronger and as a side effect bigger – producing giant titans, and also carrying some other side effects.

There is lust for love and lust for power, there are mobsters and beautiful people, twists and turns and layers of reveals which mostly made sense to me in the end. Not my favourite Nick Harkaway book, but that could at least partly be due to my not having my full wits about me while listening!

Burned: An Alex Verus Novel – Benedict Jacka- 24.05.23

I realised that the review I had written about the previous book in this series (Veiled) was actually reviewing this one (doh!) so I cut it and will paste it below, and I’ve written something else about the other book.

I think this is my favourite book in the Alex Verus Series so far! Our hero has a death sentence on his head, as well as on the heads of his little circle of friends, merely by virtue of being his dependents and only seven days to find a way to ensure their safety and hopefully also his own. I was nervously thinking ‘how on earth is he going to get out of this!?’ as I read. I thought the book was very exciting, and it has interesting politics. I liked how the relationship between Alex and his friends is getting back on track. I thought the ending was excruciating (in a good way), like something that you peek at between your fingers because it’s terrible but also fascinating- and again I’m left thinking ‘how is he going to get out of this?’ although now it’s not so much his life as his moral compass that is hanging in the balance – oooh!

The Midas Rain – Adam Roberts – 22.05.23

So, I love some of Adam Roberts books, and I like sci-fi, and this was cheap, so I gave it a go. It’s really a dystopian future, crime heist, sci-fi, thriller, and crime heist thriller type books (or movies) are not really my thing. Saying that, there were lots of things about this novella that I did enjoy, and I ended up repeatedly telling my (longsuffering) hubby wee snippets out of it because they made me thing interesting thoughts (in my mind they were interesting anyway!).

I don’t want to spoil it by saying how it ended, but I actually loved the ending, and thought it more than made up for having to sit through all the heist stuff.

The Weather Woman – Sally Gardner – 21.05.23

I think I might have bought this book by accident, thinking it was by Salley Vickers, whose books I have read and enjoyed (maybe my mind mixed it up with Salley Vickers book The Gardener!) but anyway, I’m glad I did because I really loved this book!

Set in 18th Century London, it follows Neva, who as a small child travelled with the circus where her mother (a talented chess player) hid inside a stuffed bear with clockwork parts who challenged punters to games of chess and invariably beat them!

Neva had her own talents, she could read the weather – she knew instinctively what weather was coming anywhere in the world and could predict all kinds of weather with pinpoint accuracy quite far into the future. When her parents are killed in an accident she is adopted by the clockmaker who made parts for the mechanical bear.

Her adopted father encourages her agile and intelligent mind, and also her gift and because she is an exceptionally clever woman in Regency England, she must disguise herself as a man to be able to attend lectures and join in with ‘manly’ discussions.

The book is a magical realism, feminist, historical, love story (yes there is some very sweet romance) and I very much enjoyed it.

A Town Called Solace – Mary Lawson – (BOOKGROUP) – 15.05.23

This was my book group read for May.

I found this book very readable – the style is deceptively simple and yet the themes and character development are deep and thoughtful. Told from the perspectives of a seven year old girl, Clara, whose teenaged sister has run away and now nobody can find her, and the strange man who has moved into the house across the road . Clara had been feeding the cat for the old lady who lived in the house, and can’t understand who the man is and why he’s there.

There are mysteries that slowly unfold and keep the narrative moving along nicely as well as interesting studies of how we humans cope with sadness, and loss, and loneliness. That makes is sound like a depressing read, but that’s not true, if anything I found the book uplifting and satisfying.

Veiled: An Alex Verus Novel – Benedict Jacka – 10.05.23

As usual, I’m quite far behind in writing up my book review, and as I work my way through the list of books I’ve read recently, and not reviewed, I saw the next book in this series (Burned) and realised that the review that I had posted for this book, Veiled, was actually a review of Burned, Doh! So I’ve cut that review, and I’ll paste it into the review of the actual book it should be, and then try to write something about this one.

The truth is, I can’t remember much about this book. I think that Alex started working for the Keepers, which is like the magical white mage’s secret police, and he did some undercover work with them, and the themes were about him trying to prove that he isn’t at heart a dark mage even though he (kind of unwittingly) had begun an apprenticeship with a dark mage but that he has turned his back on all that and really is a good guy. It shone a light on some of the factions and political infighting within the white mage community as well.