Pound for Pound

Unfortunately, it's been quite a disappointing month for me, reading-wise.  Don't get me wrong, it's been fabulous in terms of buying books, with new novels from Bernard Cornwell and Rachel Joyce coming out, plus Books are My Bag, but that sort of thing is not going to lead to a happily every after for my strained bookshelves.  So, to try to get back on track, I decided to read something short.  It turns out that, at just 88 pages, you can't get much shorter than 'The Tiny Wife' by Andrew Kaufman.

'The Tiny Wife' by
Andrew Kaufman
(The Friday Project, 2013)

'The Tiny Wife' is the story of a very unusual robbery and its consequences.  An unconventional thief with a gun enters a bank one Wednesday afternoon, but he doesn't want money.  Instead, he steals one item of sentimental value from each person in the building before making his escape.  This seems odd enough, but soon strange things start happening to the victims...

Andrew Kaufman's work is certainly an acquired taste.  It's magical, surreal, off-the-wall, creative, fantastical, hypnotic, peculiar and, on the face of it, rather random.  But this writer knows exactly what he's doing.  Even a story as short as this makes you think and look at things a little bit sideways for a while.  The best comparison I can think of is a fairy tale, in which tricks teach lessons and the normal rules simply don't apply.

If you like the sound of this sort of tale of the unexpected, then I would recommend this book and other work by Andrew Kaufman.  I do have one caveat, however.  This isn't really a book.  It's a short story.  In fact, it's not even really a short story.  It's a 88 pages of short story, with illustrations, and 24 pages of 'Born Weird', written by the same author, so it's more like a promo for another book.  I didn't realise this when I picked it up, so would've felt a cheated if I'd paid the full price for it.  No short story is worth £6.99.  A few pounds, definitely, but not the same as a full length novel.  Also, I don't like paying to be advertised to.  Fortunately (or unfortunately for the publishers) and perhaps proving theories suggested in my post about 'All My Friends are Superheroes' right, I found this book for £1 in a discount shop.  While that was too far to the other extreme, it's hard not to wonder whether it wouldn't have ended up there if priced more reasonably in the first place.

All I can say is this; Mr Kaufman, please stop teasing us and publish a book of short stories.  I'd be more than happy to pay full price for that.

Related Posts

'All My Friends Are Superheroes' by Andrew Kaufman
'Fragile Things' by Neil Gaiman

Tiger Feat

Although I worry that I shouldn't, I bloody love zoos.  To be honest, I could probably write a blog just about them, but I won't, because, well, that's not what you want to hear about really, is it?  And after all, surely the next best thing to going to a zoo is reading about them and the amazing people that run them.

'We Bought a Zoo'
by Benjamin Mee
(Harper, 2008/9)

I've just finished 'We Bought a Zoo', the unusual story of how journalist Benjamin Mee and his family ended up owning Dartmoor Zoological Park in Devon.  At the start of this story, Mee, his wife Katherine and two young children have just moved to France and are settling into a new life abroad, quite literally building themselves a home in the sunshine.  But then Mee hears the call of the wild.  His sister sends him details of a UK zoo that has just come on the market and the opportunity is irresistible.  Benjamin, his mum and siblings decide to follow their hearts and buy the failing zoo.  But can they overcome years of neglect, Houdini-like animals and cold hearted bankers to get Dartmoor off the endangered list?

This really is an enchanting story of passionate commitment and, in many ways, living a dream, but if you were expecting a perky, happy-go-lucky tale, think again.  While this book is very charming and down-to-earth, there is also personal tragedy at its heart.  Six months after buying the zoo, Mr Mee's wife, Katherine, dies.  As a reader, I appreciated the honesty of Mr Mee's writing about what happened and it makes his work for the zoo seem all the more incredible.

Despite the tough subject matter, this book is written in a flowing and conversational style which makes it relatively easy to read.  Part of me feels that it could do with some work in places.  For example, some sentences seem to go on like boa constrictors, so long that you can't remember their beginnings, and periodically words are repeated within lines, which is quite distracting for a language nerd like me.  I would've liked more structure too, but I suspect that this book was written around the many other duties which keep a Zoo Director busy and might have been rushed as an additional opportunity to bring more money into the park.  As such, I'm not going to nitpick about what is relatively minor in the grand scheme of things.

Overall, this is a charming and thought-provoking book that I would recommend to anyone who has ever fallen in love with a zoo.  But it is just the beginning.  Like me, other readers will want to know what happens next, more about the animals, whether Mee ever got his zebras, what it's like to actually run a working zoo rather than just prepare it for opening.  I'm lucky, I've actually visited Dartmoor Zoological Park and seen what's happening, but even I can't go as often as I would like.  So while quite a few people will be getting copies of this as Christmas presents, what I really want this year is a sequel, perhaps even a series of sequels.  Now that would be animal magic.

Check (Work) Mate

I mentioned a few posts ago that I felt fortunate because I'd only found a handful of books so awful that I'd had to give up on them.  Although I didn't actually give up on 'Office Politics' by Oliver James, Lady Luck had turned against me and I really wish I'd gone for the paperback rather than the audiobook version.

'Office Politics' should be a must-read for the modern employee.  Although we all feel like we're so busy trying to get the job done there's no time to think about anything else, we can't ignore the fact that good or bad relationships with colleagues can make or break us and our careers.  Oliver James' book aims to equip readers with enough understanding to recognise and protect themselves from the political games that other people play at work and perhaps use some tactics to help them progress.

My feelings about 'Office Politics' are a bit chequered.  The big issue with the audiobook was the narrator.  Any fan of the BBC's 'Horrible Histories' will know what I mean when I say "I'm a shouty man!".  For everyone else, imagine one of those annoying blokes who pop up in cheap adverts yelling at you to buy windows or call a personal injury hotline, like hyped up bingo callers.  My ears rang after listening to this recording for any length of time and it began to try my patience very quickly.

It didn't help that the makers somehow didn't notice the number of words that were pronounced incorrectly either, even relatively normal ones like 'persona'.  For a bookish type like me, it was rather distracting, just as typos and bad grammar are in any printed book.  I found myself hissing at the CD player like the audience at a panto.  I'm baffled at how the makers of this recording didn't notice anything wrong.

These two pretty big irritations mean I don't feel fully qualified to judge the content of the book itself.  I know that Oliver James has a bit of a monopoly on popular psychology books, so assume he must be successful for a reason.  I did find the content rather hard to get my head around at times, but this may be because when listening to something you have to keep pace with the speaker, whereas readers can both go at their preferred speed and re-read anything they're unsure of.

Overall, I think this audiobook was rubbish, but I would like to give 'Office Politics' another chance in written form.  For the moment, though, I think it's time to roll the dice and move on to something else.

Night of the Loving Dead

Until relatively recently, I'd always wanted to write a story from a monster's perspective, like a vampire or a mummy or something like that.  Having read Isaac Marion's 'Warm Bodies', I think that the idea's been done very well already.

'Warm Bodies' is the story of R, a zombie with a difference.  While he can't remember his name, how long he's been dead or how the world ended, he's still has human curiosity.  He longs to be able to know these things and more, although he's not entirely sure why.  Trapped in his own head, he chases the same thoughts every day while instinctively following the same mindless routines.  Then while on a feeding expedition in the nearby city, he meets Julie and everything changes.  Rather than eating her, R brings Julie back to his airport home.  All he wants to do is keep her safe and this sudden and perplexing change marks the beginning of something quite extraordinary.

'Warm Bodies'
by Isaac Marion
(Vintage, 2013)

I saw a review of the film based on this novel and thought it sounded like an interesting story.  Being a bit squeamish, I decided to read the book first rather than plunging right in with the movie and I'm really glad I did.  I was a bit worried that it would be squarely aimed at the teen market and a bit twee, but it isn't that simple.  R is after all a monster, something that hunts and eats humans while bits of him gradually rot and fall off. Not the most obvious of romantic heroes!  But then neither are the manipulative and obsessive Heathcliff and bullying wife-jailer Mr Rochester.

Marion sucks the reader into R's mind from the very first line and from the moment I read it I was hooked.  This is not a book about romantic love per se, rather a story themed around the things the writer loves about humanity, the characteristics that take us beyond our animal instincts and basic desires for shelter, food and flesh. As such, it's themes are more universal and thought provoking and the fragile first love that develops between R and Julie is one of just a number of human-esque features that set you thinking about what it means to be alive.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book, particularly because it doesn't answer all the questions it raises.  Although it's hinted at, we never firmly find out how the zombie plague came about or when it happened, for example.  But I think that's what sets it apart from other apocalyptic stories.  This isn't a tale about how the old world ended but how a new one began.  And surely that's far more interesting and optimistic, don't you think?