Monday, 15 July 2013

Books :: One Day + Dance Dance Dance





The Milkman and I took a little family holiday with the boys down to England last week, to Bristol to go on a Gromit hunt with a pit stop in Chester on our way back.  We really lucked out with the weather - it made up for another year without a trip abroad, because we honestly could have been in the Med!  As ever, I greatly overestimated how much lazing about I'd actually get to do (am I the only mama who needs a holiday to get over the family holiday?) and took more magazines and books than I would ever get to unpack let alone read.  But I did manage to finish the book I was on, which counts for something as I am reading at a snail's pace these days.  I give myself a target of 25 pages a night, but my eyes are often fighting to close before I've even hit ten.  So although I have a lot of holiday fun to write about (all in good time, I have a zillion photos to sort through first), I'm going to review the last two books I've read.

The book I finished on holiday was Haruki Murakami's Dance Dance Dance.  This was the third of his books that I have read (Norwegian Wood and 1Q84 were the others), and probably my least favourite.  It tells the story of a man trying to discover the whereabouts of a old girlfriend, leading him through a mysterious web of strange people all connected through an old hotel, a prostitution ring and a dysfunctional family of famous arty types.  The storyline held so much promise, but the central character was pretty bland and one dimensional.  I couldn't even picture him in my mind, there was no depth to him, and that stopped me engaging with anything he did or said.  The only strong emotion he drew from me was disgust at his creepy way of speaking to one of the younger female characters.  His attitude to women in general was seedy, but even that wasn't examined at any length - he just seemed to plod along between one encounter to another.  I don't know if it was a cultural divide or something had been lost in translation from the original Japanese, but I failed to see what his motivation was in trying to solve a mystery about a particular woman when women didn't seem to mean much to him on an emotional level anyway.  And then when he did find out, he basically just shrugged and kept on plodding on.  I don't think he was interested in her or any of the other women in the book, he was just trying to fill his own dull little life.  Having said all this though, I do like Murakami's prose.  I like how he can weave total fantasy into a story and it not ending up too out there, and the more I read of his work the more I love the dysfunctional families he brings to life.  But this particular novel left me a little flat.

Before that I read David Nicholls' One Day.  I wasn't expecting much from this, if I'm honest.  I bought it only because someone gave the Milkman a copy of the film, and because there had been so much made of the fact it was an adaptation I decided to read it first.  But my impression was that it was going to be a naff romance thing...I was so wrong!  Firstly, it's set in Britain, which was a nice surprise as I thought it was American.  But even if it was set on the moon it wouldn't have mattered because what drew me in was the format of the story - a snapshot of the same day on each passing year in the relationship of two people, Emma and Dexter.  And I really enjoyed watching their lives and relationship unfold and change over those years, being given just enough to be able to fill in the gaps without being bogged down in the details.  It was a beautifully told story, with good bursts of humour and very relatable characters.  Though most of the time all I could relate to Dexter was the urge to slap him...but unlike Murakami's unlikeable character I think that was an emotion the author wanted to bring out in the reader, and it added to the experience.
 

 That takes me to six books of a minimum of 132 I need to read to achieve in order to achieve goal #85 of my Day Zero project.  I really need to up my game if I want to read 126 more books in the next 28 months!

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Any views expressed in this blog are mine alone. If I am ever lucky enough to be invited by a company to review their product/service, then I will always state so in the entry as well as disclosing any benefit I've received for doing so.