In a Bit of a Flap

I have just finished reading a book so slim that I've managed to lose it!

The book in question is 'The Pigeon' by Patrick Suskind, the shortest volume in my collection with a tiny 77 pages of rather large type.  Suskind is best known for 'Perfume', one of the few books I've read in record time (a day and a half to be exact - who'd of thought I could achieve such speed?!).  It was my affection for 'Perfume' which made me want to read 'The Pigeon'.

'The Pigeon' by Patrick Suskind
(Penguin, 1989)

'The Pigeon' is the story of Jonathan Noel and how the unexpected encounter he has with a pigeon throws his detached and ordered life askew.  But is the end of Jonathan's chosen life?

I'm finding it extremely hard not to make comparisons between this book and 'Perfume'.  Both focus on an extremely insular and isolated individual and display Suskind's uncanny ability to evoke the claustrophobic lives people can create for themselves.

A word of warning to the delicate.  Suskind can write images of great beauty and precision, but also create passages which evoke feelings of extreme disgust and revulsion.  At one point, 'The Pigeon' actually make me feel sick, so I was glad I wasn't reading it on the train or something.  Sometimes I really wish I could turn my imagination off!  It was pretty short, though, and, like the violence of 'Perfume', part of the way Suskind weaves stories using dichotomy.

Whilst it may not be everyone's cup of tea, I found 'The Pigeon' is an interesting study of one man's descent into isolation and fear and a parable for us all about getting stuck in a rut.  Like 'Perfume', it's likely to stay in my mind for a while yet.  Which is just as well as I've no idea where the printed version is!

Getting into Bad Habits!

After a very slow month reading-wise, I've finally finished 'One Corpse Too Many' by Ellis Peters, the second in the twenty-strong series of novels featuring medieval detective Brother Cadfael.

In this outing, the Abbey of St Peter and St Paul is caught up in King Stephen's 1138 siege of Shrewsbury.  After the town falls and the King has taken his executed the castle's defenders, Brother Cadfael is called upon to help give them some dignity in death.  But when he counts the number of bodies, he realises there is something amiss - he has one corpse too many.  Although the King gives him permission to find who murdered the unexpected cadaver, it's a race against time to do justice before the armies move on...

'One Corpse Too Many'
by Ellis Peters (Sphere, 2010)

This book really shouldn't have taken me three weeks to read.  It's only 282 pages long for crying out loud!  But I think a combination of lots of other things going on generally and the fact that I've read some of the later novels already didn't help.  It was hard to get a sense of urgency and peril when I knew what happened to certain characters in later books.  In retrospect, I rather regret reading them in such an eclectic order.

While on the subject of the other novels, I would definitely recommend 'Monks Hood' (book 3), 'A Morbid Taste for Bones' (Book 1) and 'Brother Cadfael's Penance (book 20).  I've not read all the books in between, but I'm definitely going to work through them in order from now on!

If I hadn't known what I did, I would have enjoyed this book very much.  It's a good plot yet relatively simple and, as always, Ellis Peters creates a wonderful sense of time and place.  I've always loved that element of the books, it's somehow escapist despite the crime and violence!  The only criticism I have is that the big 'love in' towards the end felt a bit sudden and over the top after the rest of the book, which was a shame.  I guess Peters was just an old romantic at heart.  It's a funny old world.

I'm Still Here...

OK, I know I've been completely rubbish this month and am on the very verge of failing in my project when I've barely begun.  But let's face it, a get-up-and-go organised type would never get themselves into a position where they had 450+ unread books in the first place!  The good news is that although I've not been reading or blogging as much as I'd have liked, I've not been buying any books either (though I have been sorely tempted many, many times).  And I've shaved five books off the list, so that's saved me a minimum of a month trudging though books that I feel I ought to read rather than have any particular desire or need to read.  So, what have I been doing?

Well, I have been reading a bit.  My current companion is the unlikely detective Brother Cadfael, who is presently giving a stalker the run around in 'One Corpse Too Many' by Ellis Peters.  Other than that, I think I've let myself get a bit distracted by admin.  I've rearranged my books a couple of times (at the moment they're in rough order by length, although I think I'm going to change it again to by author, or possibly by author except where I have several books by one author, when I will pick one for my main stack and relegate the others somewhere less tempting.  That's at least a day's procrastinating...) and have been regularly tweeting and checking my blog stats.  Unsurprisingly, I've not been getting many visitors.  After all there's nothing new for you to see!

So, it's time to get back on track otherwise I'm never going to reach a point when I don't feel guilty about walking into a bookshop.  Makes me feel a right old perv looking and not buying!

Back to Brother Cadfael it is then...

Getting into the Spirit of things...

My latest book may not be the sort of thing that many people would read, but I hope you'll find my thoughts on it interesting.  I've just finished 'Joyful Voices' by Doris Stokes, an omnibus of her last two autobiographies 'Voices of Love' and 'Joyful Voices'.

In case you're not aware of her, Doris Stokes was a famous medium in the 1970s and '80s.  More specifically, she was called 'clairaudient' because she heard the voices of dead people rather than seeing manifestations of them.  In this book, she talks about her day-to-day life and encounters with grieving families, celebrities and, of course, those in the Spirit World.

'Joyful Voices' by
Doris Stokes
(Sphere 2007)

It can be easy to dismiss people's beliefs as ridiculous, but it's harder to dismiss the person.  That's certainly true of Mrs Stokes.  Whether you agree with her belief in the afterlife or not, it's hard to think her a bad person when she seems to just want to help people to come to terms with their loss.  She comes across as quite a kind hearted person and the book is carried along by her constant optimism and hope for better to come.

I rather liked the style of the book.  It's episodic and chatty and very easy to read, much like a magazine, so it wasn't at all hard going.  It was certainly what I needed after my encounter with Ernest Hemingway!

While it may not be high literature, the book is still an interesting curiosity.  It's fascinating to hear her normalise hearing voices and of particular interest was the transcript of her last sitting at the end of the book. It even led to me looking up some clips of Mrs Stokes on You Tube.  It's genuinely fascinating to see how her at work and I would recommend the clips to anyone interested in finding out more about her activities.

If you want to know more about Mrs Stokes, however, I would suggest that you don't start here.  I've read Mrs Stokes' first omnibus, 'Voices', which included 'Voices in My Ear' and 'More Voices in My Ear'.  I enjoyed the book very much, so, when I saw this one, I snapped it up too.  Unfortunately, it's not as good.  It's not really the author's fault, she was ailing and in her late sixties by the time she wrote her last two books and as a result she just doesn't get about as much as she used to.  As such, the stories become a bit repetitive and, in a strange way, mundane after a while.  The celebrity name dropping becomes irritating too, particularly as I didn't recognise some of the names at all.  There are even whole chapters dedicated to poems sent to her, which is both kinda sweet and irritating at the same time.  Equally, although she's right to not to preach through her books, it's a shame that she avoids the bad press entirely, as it would be interesting to hear her side of the argument.  It's almost as if she's saying "It's up to you love, but which is the nicer idea to live with?"

They say that if you open your mind too much, your brain will fall out, but you don't learn much by keeping it too closed either.  If you're interested in this sort of thing, start with 'Voices'.  If you're not interested in this sort of thing, I'd stay well away.  You're probably not going to enjoy it as the best you can hope to do is insulting a harmless old lady.  And that's a bit low, don't you think?