It's been a while since I last poasted about the books I've read lately. Mostly because I didn't read many books during all the studying I did. And not all the books I read during the last few weeks were as good as they proised to be.

But let's move on to the list.


Shopaholic Takes Manhattan by Sophie Kinsella

This is not the kind of book I usually read, but my father, fully aware of my handbag addiction, had given me one of the sequels for my birthday once, and since I recently visited Manhattan for the first time, I thought "Shopaholic Takes Manhattan" could be fun. But I found that in this book, Shopaholics shopping addiction is a bit over the top even for her, seeing that she almost becomes bankrupt twice because of it, and then sells everything she owns. I had also been hoping for more Manhattan, but there were almost no recognizable descriptions. But considering that it took me a bit less than two hours to read the book, two hours in which I didn't think about studying at all, I don't feel as if I have wasted my money. Just that I could have spend it better.



The End of The World by Michael Cunningham
It sounded so interesting: gay boy love, possibly threesomes, NYC in the eighties... And it was good, at least the first part about their youth was. NYC is slightly less interesting and it deteriorates from there. It's not the writing, it's the characters. I failed to fall in love with any of them because I never understood what motivates them. I read that they loved each other, but I couldn't feel it with them. In the end, I failed to care enough about them that it would have mattered to me what happened them after I left their little book world.

I was really disappointed by this book, partly because I enjoyed reading it, devouring the pages to finally reach the point where the author would make me care, which never came. Partly because the reviews had been so good. I guess some people will like his writing, but I don't, and I will not read another book written by him.



Marley and Me by John Grogan
This is one of the handful of books I have read where I have read the ending first. See, Marley and Me is a book about a dog. And books about dogs, especially the ones written by men, usually end with the dog dying. They dsecribe the whole life of the dog, make me fall in love with it, and then it dies. So, after I had fallen in love with Marley the dog, I decided to read about his death first, and then read about the rest of his life, leaving him at a point where he is still young and healthy and I could imagine a happy end for him.

Other than that, this book is entertaining, but it's a particular kind of entertainment only dog owners can fully appreciate. Because I really doubt people who don't have dogs will want to read about fleas, or dog puke, or drool dripping off everywhere. Marley, of course, isn't the worst dog, and this is the part where I got angry. See, where I live, no one would ever have the idea that a dog would be happy with the backyard and could be left alone all day in the garage. People frown upon that kind of behaviour here, even people who don't own dogs. Dogs are commitment, they need walks, at least three times a day, ideally more, they need someone to be with them at least half the day, and they need contact with other dogs. So, if I read about Marley's "dog poo bombs" in the backyard, I don't feel sorry at all. My own dog would never even pee in our garden. There is no reason for a dog to pee in his own territory unless there is no other place they can go to.

And if I read about Marley being untrainable and having to be calmed with sedatives, I see a poor Labrador, whom nobody ever tried to train properly, who doesn't know what to do with his energy because he is only taken for walks every couple of days, who never really had the chance to play with other dogs.

But what made me evn more angry was that the author in the book becomes a father, and they leave Marley with the little babies. He has the audacity to make a smart remark about people who warn against leaving your dog with a baby, because "the wild animal could surface every minute and the dog could kill the baby in seconds". Which Marley would never do,because everyone can see that he protects the baby.
*bangs head against wall*
See, he is right about that. I believe that most normal dogs will protect a baby that they consider part of the family. Eve strange babies, because they see them as puppies, and normal dogs don't hurt puppies. What they do with puppies however, is that they teach them not to totally misbehave by taking their whole head into their mouth and shaking it gently. I've seen my dog do that with puppies, and apart from a lot of spit, the puppy was impressed, but not hurt. So me dogs will also take the puppy by the neck and shake it a little bit, or gently put their mouth over the exposed neck of the puppy to show them how such misbehaviour would end if they weren't so small. All these methods have one thing in common: if applied to a human baby, the end up in serious injuries.

So I can not stres it enough: NEVER leave your kids alone with a dog. NEVER. It's up to you to know when yur kids are old enough to understand what to do and what not to do with a dog, but hair-pulling or nose hitting or anything else that babies do out of curiosity can lead even the most patient dog to teach your baby some manners. You cannot fault the dog for this, because it only reacts as a normal dog would react. Butif you read up on "formerly harmless pets" hurting babies "ou of the blue", you will see that it's mostly head injuries, and that all those poor dogs are being put to sleep because their owners thought it was cute how they took care of the baby. The owner should be shot and never allowed to have kids or dogs again.

Right.
Where were we? Oh, the book. Well, I liked Marley, but I think that people who have a dog for 13 years and still don't know the first thing about dogs, shouldn't be allowed to write books about them. Let alone get a new dog.




Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

The first really good book of this list. Never Let Me Go is set in a universe that is almost like ours. In fact, so much that one wonders what makes us different, what it would take for the same thing to happen here. I don't want to give away too many details, but the protagonist are different, in what ways we only learn in the course of the book, which follows their life and their growing up from young pupils to their final purpose.

Never Let Me Go is incredibly well written, each character unique and human. The important questions in this book, the "Why" and "what does no one try to escape from this life" are never asked by the characters, and the protagonists, trying to learn about themselves, always know a bit more than the reader does. And so the reader constantly questions things, wonders, feels for and with the characters. I highly recommend this book, and I will definitely read it again in a while.

(if you want more details, read through the amazon reviews, but I chose to not spoil you here.)




The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

This book was recommended to me somewhere in fandom as a children's book that is also interesting to adults. I admit that I wasn't particularly impressed with it, and I can't see it as something that I would give my kids to read. My main complaint is the "means to an end" style the author uses. A bit like in a computer game, our main character Lyra runs from one wise man to another in her quest to find some missing children. This is practical, because except for one scene in the beginning, she doesn't have to find out things herself, since the wise men will always tell her in long, question-answer dialogues which will reveal the next part of the plot. Nothing is ever really set up to lead somewhere, as we know if from Harry Potter, everything is happening in dialogue, which sounded so constructed and goal-oriented that it rarely every convinced me.

The narrator is probably supposed to be an all-knowing narrator (sorry, don't know the english term for that), but he slips into Lyra's POV with no pattern I could discover. I don't usually care about this kind of thing, the fact that I noticed shows how disturbing it was. The protagonist is, well, I don't know why anyone writing children's book would invent an "unimaginative" (quote), lying, sometimes even hateful character like Lyra. I started to like her a bit more during the second half of the book, but mostly because I felt sorry for her. Then I discovered that she is supposed to be older than 11, when she makes herself younger by telling someone that she is eleven. Until the I had thought she was maybe 8 or 9. Shortly after that I stopped reading the book.



Last Chance To See by Douglas Adams and Mark Cawardine

Douglas Adams' famous book about his travels to animals that are about to be extinct. As entertaining, hilarious and smart as everything else Adams has written, but because of its subject definitely my favourite of his books. I can't believe it took me so long to read this. Maybe, if more people had read this book sooner, the statistisc would lok a bit better today. Let's take a look at how the animals that Adams visited in 1990 are doing 16 years later.

Komodo Dragon
1990: appr. 5000
2006: appr. 6000
Classified Vulnerable by the IUCN Red List, mostly due to its restricted habitat.

Mountain Gorilla
1990: ca. 280
2006: ca. 380
Classified Endangered by the IUCN.

Northern White Rhinoceros
1990: 22
2006: 5 to 20, depending on source
Classified Critically Endangered.

Kakapo
1990: 40
2006: 86
Classified Critically Endangered.

Baiji Dolphin
1990: 200
2006: unknown. 1998 7 were found
Classified Critically Endangered. Which, if you haven't guessed already, is the last step to extinct.

Mauritius Kestrel
1990: I can't seem to find the information in the book.
2006: ca. 1000
Classified Vulnerable

Echo Parakeet
1990: 15
2006: less than 200
Classified Critically Endangered.

The one plant he visited, the wild coffee plant Ramus Mania, seems to have disappeared, if not from Mauritius, at least from the web.

Well, this turned out to be a lot longer than I expected. And a bit more depressing as well. I think I need to read another book.