“And to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street” by Dr. Seuss

Firstly, in case you don’t know, the author’s real name was Theodor Seuss Geisel. Quite a mouthful.

Secondly, yes, I read this for the first time as an adult. That probably gives me an odd perspective in this review, but bear with me. And yes, my parents did buy me books as a child and I belonged to a library, but the Dr. Seuss books just weren’t well known in Ireland in the 1970s.

At a mere 27 pages, this is one of the shortest books on the 501 List and is perfect for children being read to, or those starting to read by themselves. My two, aged 6 and 8 currently, love it, although “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” and “Green Eggs and Ham” beat it to the top spot on their personal Dr. Seuss list.

Illustrated brilliantly by the author, the story describes how a young boy embellishes the things seen on his walk home into an amazing, outlandish tale. I love how the child’s imagination is limitless and it reminds me of writing fiction myself. But I found the ending sad, but realistic, when the boy lacks the confidence to tell his strictly factual father the story.

Now for some background to the book, with thanks to a review of Donald E. Pease’s biography of the author. “And to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street” was Seuss’s first published story, in 1937. It certainly hasn’t dated in the interim. Thankfully he was banned, due to a prank, from editing his college’s humour magazine. He obeyed this by submitting cartoons only and building his artistic talent.

As an adult he wanted to wanted influence the politics and society of the cold war environment and chose to do so via zany children’s literature because children have open minds. He used implausible facts to create a plausible world (from a child’s perspective) and called this “logical insanity”.

Whatever it was, and whatever the motive, it worked. His books delight millions and definitely deserve a place on the 501 list.

(read Summer 2011)

“I am Legend” by Richard Matheson

As someone who doesn’t read a lot of sci-fi or fantasy, I had never heard of Richard Matheson before tackling “I am Legend” for the 501 Books list. So I was impressed to find Stephen King quoted on the back cover as saying that Matheson was a major influence on his writing.

The more sci-fi I read for this list, the more I realise that there were a handful of writers in the 1950s who created the genre as we  know it today, and sure enough this book, first published in 1954, is amongst that list. You could assume that it would feel dated given all the changes in technology since that time, but this is a classic vampire/bio-hazard tale and in fact it feels distinctly modern. I haven’t seen the 2007 film based on the novel starring Will Smith, but I’ve been told it’s only loosely based on the book.

At a mere 178 pages long, the story, told with very few characters and a limited setting, paints a scary portrait of life for the hero Robert Neville. He’s the last man on Earth thanks to a plague which has turned everybody else into a vampire. His isolation and grief (his wife and daughter succumbed to the disease) are brilliantly protrayed and far from being dismal to read he has a strong sense of humour holding him together. I enjoyed when he, near hysterics, called for a policeman when he parked his car illegally in the deserted city where he lives.

He lives in the daytime only, patrolling in search of the undead to kill them. At night he’s the prey, so he barricades himself in his home and tries to ignore them and avoid insanity, drunkeness, and despair. As Matheson writes; “imprisoned on an island of night surrounded by oceans of death”.

When his solitary existance and quest for an explanation or cure for the disease is interrupted by first a dog and then a woman, Neville has to face tougher challenges.

The writing is excellent, the plotline intriquing and compelling. I’d recommend this book for any sci-fi or fantasy fan as well as anyone who likes a thought-provoking read. I really enjoyed it and am putting it in my Best of The Books category.

(read April 2012)

“The Man who was Thursday” by G.K. Chesterton

First published in 1908, I should mention this novel’s subtitle before starting my review – the book is more fully titled as “The Man who was Thursday – a Nightmare”. That word nightmare is vital to understanding the story.

At just over 200 pages, the nightmare is brief and Chesterton keeps a fast pace throughout this thriller-style novel. He opens with a scene in a leafy London suburb where a man called Syme at a garden/house party meets a man called Lucian Gregory who likes to pose as an anarchic poet. After the party ends, Syme finds himself entangled with Gregory. They argue verbally and Gregory decides to show Syme that he is a real anarchist by bringing him to a secret meeting where his group is about to elect their member on the ruling council.

The council, led by a mysterious figure called Sunday, is composed of seven anarchists, each named for a day of the week. Syme, a undercover philosophical policeman recruited by an unseen superior, engineers the meeting to elect him as their member – the man called Thursday. From that point onwards Syme rushes all over Europe trying to defeat the anarchists’ plots while avoiding discovery by Sunday, and in the process finding plot twists galore.

Like any nightmare, the truth is a loose concept and shadows may contain friends or foes. Our dreams rarely follow a logical path but Chesterton manages to weave a reasonable semblance of a story with believeable characters despite their sometimes stereotypical appearances. Considering the book is now over a hundred years old, the basic premise about how to defeat terrorism is still remarkably topical and the experimental method of writing the story feels fresh.

I think to enjoy this book you have to suspend your disbelief and go along for the ride, putting down the more outlandish co-incidences to how the human mind operates during a nightmare. Do that and it may surprise you.

(read March 2012)

“Boy” by Roald Dahl

All authors were once children, none more so than authors of books for children. They have that magical ability to remember the joys and sorrows of youth. Roald Dahl had that gift by the bucketload and it led to truly wonderful books like “The BFG”, “Fanastic Mr. Fox”, and many others.

I’m lucky, I think, because I never read his books as a child – somehow I missed out on Dahl. However a friend recently got me the box-set of his entire works for me to read to my own children and we’re loving them together. I was delighted to find the two volumes of Dahl’s autobiography in the set – “Boy” (which is on the 501 Books List) and “Going Solo” (which isn’t).

I enjoy autobiographies anyhow, but I particularly relished “Boy” because Dahl sets out to recount only the stories from his childhood which he can still see vividly in his memory as a middle-aged author. The result is a vibrant tale of mischief, school-days, and strange characters he encountered. Having read all his kids’ books recently it was easy to spot a few things which turn up later in his fiction. There’s his addiction to sweet-shops, some very tall people (including himself), and a plot involving mice. In the later volume, “Going Solo”, which covers his years working for Shell Oil in Africa and then flying for the RAF in World War II, there’s an amazing description of him walking amongst giraffes and talking to them which makes me suspect I know the original of the Giraffe in “The Giraffe, the Pelly, and Me”.

But for “Boy” he mines his life from age zero to twenty. There are stories of his family’s annual trip to the remote islands of Norway, details of the tuck box system, enthusings about his lifelong photographic hobby, and wince-inducing descriptions of the canings he endured for misbehaviour in school. Any fan of his writing will enjoy this short, and fun life-story, but I think autobiography buffs will enjoy it too because of the light hand he uses in picking out the highlights. There’s a total lack of boring dates and facts, the photos are all interesting, and the details included are well-chosen.

“Boy” could be read by junior fans of his fiction, but I’d suggest keeping “Going Solo” for the ten-plus age range as some of the stories there are more brutal in nature.

In case you’re wondering, Boy is what he signed himself in his letters home from boarding school.

(read March 2012)

“The Little Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

While many of the books on the 501 list are massive tomes, many are shorter and all the more approachable for that. One such is “The Little Prince”. First published in 1943, a year before the author’s death in action, it’s debatable if the story should be shelved with children’s books or on the adult bookcases. I think, perhaps, both.

At only 109 pages and including lovely illustrations by the author, you won’t take long to read the tale of an airman’s discovery in the desert of a little boy who has travelled from a distant planet. The young boy takes a clear-eyed view of our world, and those he has explored.

Anybody who can recall seeing things differently as a child will love this story. Saint-Exupery clearly didn’t regard himself as a boring grown-up, and sometimes even grown-ups need reminding to see into the heart of things.

I can’t wait to read this to my own children as I think it works well on both age levels. I’ll be interested to see what they make of it.

(read February 2012)

“Austerlitz” by W.G.Sebald

This novel was not to my personal taste. However that didn’t stop a slew of literary authors and experts putting it on their book of the year list when it was published. He was often cited as a potential winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. I may be wrong. They may be wrong. Ultimately you’ll have to decide for yourself. However I can give a rough idea of what sort of book it is.

The story follows a young Jewish boy called Austerlitz who is evacuated from war-torn Europe in 1939 on a KinderTransport. When he arrives in Britain he is placed with a strict Calvinist Welsh couple who raise him without telling him about his past. When he’s fifteen and both his foster parents die, he discovers his real name but even then he blocks all memories of his origins from his mind. Much later in life he unravels his past and tells his story to the narrator of the novel, a friend whom he sees infrequently.

Sebald writes lovely prose and some of the images he creates in the book are haunting. He takes memory as his theme and explores it throughout the book. Of course memory is disjointed and patchy by nature, and so is the narrative. Austerlitz’s life story is found out in spurts and out of chronological order, and that’s how it’s presented to the reader. I liked his surprising use of black and white photos throughout the book. Austerlitz is a keen photographer as well as an architecture and art professor, so Sebald includes many snaps the character takes as he travels around Europe for work, leisure, and while hunting his past.

Who would like this book? I think lovers of literary fiction will find much here to enjoy. Sebald was clearly trying something a bit different. Lovers of architecture will enjoy Austerlitz’s observations. Those interested in the KinderTransports will find some items of interest, although this is not a historical novel, he clearly did his research.

Why didn’t I enjoy it? Ultimately despite the quality of the writing I was overwhelmed by descriptions and observations which for me didn’t bring me closer to the character or to his story. I felt the book stopped abruptly rather than having a proper ending. There was very little about Austerlitz’s interaction with other people – he finds his former babysitter but there’s no indication of his feelings there or towards his birth parents. We don’t even find out why or how he eventually lost the only woman who ever tried to become close to him. Even the narrator and Austerlitz barely connect. I just couldn’t get to the heart of Austerlitz.

(read February 2012)

“Walden; or, Life in the Woods” by Henry David Thoreau

Not having been educated in North America I had heard of Thoreau only because the quotation (below) from this book was used in the movie “Dead Poets’ Society” -

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die; discover that I had not lived.”

At only 216 pages, his detailed account of his two years living at Walden Pond in a cabin in the woods won’t delay you long, but while you read it you’ll feel like you’re there in the forest with him. You watch him building his simple house, sowing his beans, studying the lake on his doorstep, and musing on topics like economy, solitude, clothing, sounds, and visitors.

He had plenty of visitors. “I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.” I love that idea.  If more came, they stood and he had more than twenty in his single-roomed cabin more than once. I had assumed he lived a hermit’s life. But actually he used to walk into town most days, along the railway track, except during deep snows.

The sheer variety of concepts amazed me, and much of his advice is excellent. He tells readers to avoid new enterprises which require us to buy new clothes, but to try it in old clothes first. Everyone who bought new art sets, sushi kits, and exercise gear this January can relate to that idea.

He studied the ice on the pond in winter by lying down on it at all times of the day and stages of freezing to count the bubbles per inch. The wildlife, which became accustomed to him quickly, must have enjoyed that scene.

Having eaten fried rat when necessary, he believed that as civilisation progressed all men would stop eating meat. His largely vegetarian diet during his two years at the pond came from his economical but low-effort farming. He even gives the full accounts of his expenditure and income during the two years in order to convince others to try the experiment, because he believed we need to stop burdening ourselves with worldly goods to realise our full potential. Reading this in the aftermath of a major house-crash here made me realise how applicable much of his thinking is today.

This beautifully written, inspiring book should be read slowly and enjoyed as much for his ideas as for the language he uses. His love for Walden Pond shines through. He left the woods to try out a new life and to avoid being stuck in a rut. Clearly it remained with him forever, urging him, as he does the readers, to explore the vast worlds inside his own mind and soul, and to advance confidently in the direction of his dreams.

(read December 2011)