Saturday, October 24, 2009

The Kitchen God's Wife by Amy Tan

I had to check on Blogger that I hadn't read this book before...it seemed very familiar....but it doesn't look as if I've read any of hers...I think the style is just comfortable. It's about a Chinese mother and grown up daughter living in America. Over the course of the book the mother shares secrets about her life in China and the daughter confesses a secret that she has kept from her mother.
9/10

Friday, October 23, 2009

Portnoy's complaint by Philip Roth

My first Philip Roth. Won't be my last (have you noticed how media-popular he is at the moment? I think it was funny and a typically radical, shocking 1960s book. I don't know whether it was 'from the heart' or cynically designed to shock. But it could easily offend the sensitive! A monolog of a man's discussion with his psychiatrist (just the man talking, no comments from the psychiatrist - get it? VERY american jewish indeed, which made it very funny for me. But boy is it crude. His obsessions about his hyper-controlling mum, sex, sex, sex . . . goy (that's non-jewish) girls, sex, sex, sex, and just sheer jewishness are superbly written. But this book could offend from a variety of different angles!

9/10

Tuesday, October 06, 2009

A Most Wanted Man by John Le Carre

Excellent. A John Le Carre book that you can follow without drawing organisation diagrams, a page-turning fast read, and a bang up to date context.

Set in modern Germany, involving all of the modern anti-terrorist and political organisations from Germany, America and England, some Islamic people who may be Turkish or Chechen and who may or may not be legal immigrants and who may or may not be militant. And an Englishman running a private bank in Hamburg in its dying years but which holds massive questionable deposits from the cloudy past.

Are you keeping up?

10/10

Thursday, October 01, 2009

Landfall by Nevil Shute

Got this book as a book swap. It's set in the 2nd World war and is about a pilot who is accused of bombing an English submarine. A bit of a love story in with it too. Quite dated in its style and no where near as good as "On the Beach".
6/10