5inabus

The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True by Richard Dawkins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

According to my 9 year old “everyone HAS to have a religion!!”. I’m not going to argue with him - we live in a country where we hear the call to prayer on average 5 times a day. It’s not so easy to compete with a reminder like that. Enter: Richard Dawkins for kids. Correction, “Richard Dawkins For Kids Who Always Ask Those Damned Difficult Questions”.

It’s definitely biased (would you have expected anything less?), presenting religion as just another fairy-tale or cutesy legend passed on down through the generations. I don’t think it needed to be quite so patronising in tone; there was a lot of scope to explore the reasons WHY different cultures may have used different stories to explain various phenomena of the physical world, which would have been incredibly interesting in and of itself - but that opportunity goes begging. However I doubt Dawkins would make any apology for that. The sole focus of this book is “reality”, science and the quest to explain human evolution in a manner that kids (and adults for that matter) can actually understand. The chapter “Who Was The First Man” is brilliant in this regard, and the practical mental exercise which prompts children to visualise the measurement of time going back hundreds of thousands of years is simple but incredibly effective.

In summary, I highly recommend this book be given equal shelf space in your kids’ home library, alongside any and all holy books that may also dwell in your house.


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The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Me and 36,700 other people enjoyed the dust-cover off this book. I haven’t got it in me to write a full review, because I’m feeling a little sheepish. Here’s why:

1 - It’s a love story between two terminally-ill cancer patients, and I laughed quite a lot
2 - It’s meant to be for Young Adults, but I’m 34. Does that make the book really good, or me really immature?
3 - It’s only been in bookstores for 6 months, which means I paid the full hard-back price for this book, and I never, ever buy hardbacks. They are expensive. They are heavy. They ruin the visually-pleasing height thing I have going in my paperback dominated bookcase.
4 - I was affected by the declarations of love on these pages enough to write down the quotes for future reference. Such as:

“I’m in love with you, and I’m not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I’m in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with you.”

I must admit, I’m a bit of a snob. Liking a book on the NY Time Bestseller list irks me. I would have preferred to be in the company of the 5 people that gave this book less than 3 stars (look them up, their reviews are solid).

But books are like lovers. You can’t always help who you’re attracted to.



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The Wandering Falcon by Jamil Ahmad
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book reads like a book of short but interconnected stories bound together by one character who appears in all of them. The Wandering Falcon is not a central character in any of the stories, instead his observations take the form of a non-judgmental commentary from the periphery. The stories centre around a group of nomadic tribes in the areas where the borders of Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan meet. For hundreds of years these tribes have moved freely in this region according to the push and pull of the seasons, but as the lines of modern nation states are drawn up their traditional ways of life suddenly come under threat.

It’s authentic, beautifully written and incredibly sad for the most part - the treatment of women, as with many novels set in against a traditional backgrop in the Middle East, makes for uneasy reading to put it lightly. But the result, as always, is to feel better informed; as though someone has pushed the door open just far enough to catch a glimpse at what’s inside.

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Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This book builds suspense and intrigue like the promise of a good… sneeze, only to see the eventual climax evaporate into thin air. Listening to someone scrape their fingers down a blackboard would have been easier than listening to Kathy tell her story, recalling memories from childhood with an implausible and unemotional clarity. Even Kazuo Ishiguro himself admits, rather sheepishly, to having overplayed the “mysterious” elements of the book to the extent that the basic philosophical and ideological issues he had intended to probe seem to pass somewhat under the radar.

With what almost sounds like regret, Kazuo says that people tend to get more out of the book when they read it for a second time (or perhaps after having watched the movie?). Which is a shame - in this day an age it’s hard to sell a book once, let alone twice. That’s not to say I didn’t work out early on that this was about clones. (That’s not a spoiler either - Kazuo says if he were to republish the book he’d like to throw people that bone on page 1 as opposed to page 79). But as one who hadn’t seen the movie,

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The Descendants by Kaui Hart Hemmings
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

She’s an asshole, he’s an ignoramus. Not really what I would have said a promising start for a novel, yet somehow I became invested in their story. In fact, at certain points I couldn’t put it down and I’m sure that is entirely due to the fact Joanie was SUCH an awful excuse for a wife (not to mention mother), and Matt King a truly pitiable excuse for a husband and father. Add to the mix their two kids, one a 17 year old ex-model and recovering drug-addict and the other a very odd ten year old with a penchant for talking dirty, and the whole thing makes for a scene you don’t want to watch but can’t quite turn away from. It’s darkly humorous and deeply, deeply tragic.

The book gives away all the spoilers on the back cover before you begin, so no harm in retelling it here. Joanie, a beautiful, charismatic (but completely self-obsessed and immature) woman lies in a coma after a boating accident. While her husband (head-in-a-hole workaholic) comes to terms with his wife’s inevitable death, his eldest daughter confirms the suspicions he’d long been trying to deny: his wife had been having an affair. Against a backdrop of negotiations into the sale of inherited ancestral land in Hawai’i (which has more of a role to play in the plot than you might think), the story then centers around a road-trip Matt takes with his children to find his wife’s lover and bring him, ill-advisedly or not, to her bedside before they turn off the machines.

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The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It’s disturbing that a book so bleak and depressing should be so hilarious that I literally couldn’t contain my laughter. I mean, since when did stories of cold-blooded murder fall into the realm of comedy? And try telling the people around you, annoyed by your constant snorting, that the book that that’s got you in stitches is a 19th century Western narrated by a psychopathic hit-man with a violent temper, who also just happens to have this really sweet vulnerable side; you know, once you get to know him.

But that’s what makes Patrick deWitt’s book so fantastic - no two pieces (i.e. the morally repugnant side and the thigh-slapping idiocy side) fit together. Yet as a whole it somehow works. The New York Times Review sums it up perfectly:

“The Sisters Brothers” is surely gritty, as well as deadpan and often very comic. Eli Sisters tells the story in a loftily formal fashion, doggedly literal, vulgar and polite at turns, squeezing humor out of stating the obvious with flowery melodrama.”

Here’s an example:

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