Review: A Time of Gifts (Part One). Patrick Leigh Fermor.

Originally written: 22/07/19. Contains spoilers.

Since reading Laurie Lee’s famous Cider With Rosie trilogy a while back, which completely enraptured me, I’ve been looking out for any similar books; real stories about travelling the world, or at least part of it. (This hasn’t helped with my unobtainable wanderlust.)

This book, I think, has been the first I’ve come across that suits what I’ve been seeking out. Patrick was a free-spirited student who left London in the mid-1930’s to travel Europe and eventually reach Constantinople. In this first volume, he goes through Germany, Austria and the Slavic countries to get there, travelling along the Danube River for a time.

Review: The Song of Achilles. Madeline Miller.

Originally written: 08/07/19. Contains spoilers and one two three four five brat-induced instances of strong language.

Loved it. Not as much as Circe, maybe, and there were one or two things I would have liked to see happen that didn’t, but over all this was a great book. I am fast becoming a Madeline Miller fan. For one, she has this way of talking about real world issues without them feeling heavy handed or on the nose.

Review: L’Morte D’Arthur, volume one. Sir Thomas Mallory.

Originally written: 05/07/19. Contains spoilers… for a thousand year old book, but all the same.

I started reading this book in December 2018 and it’s taken me up to now to actually finish it. I probably would have finished it sooner, but my copy was written in a lot of Ye Olde English and if I wanted to actually understand what I was reading, it was going to take me a bit longer than usual. That, and a great deal more concentration.

Review: Circe. Madeline Miller.

Originally written: 04/07/19. Contains spoilers.

For some reason, I often have less to say about books I enjoy than those I don’t. That probably says a lot about me, but no bother…

I loved this book, far more than I had expected to as well. It was recommended to me by a staff member at Waterstones and it took me a while to get round to reading it, but once I started I had it finished in a day. There were some moments in the plot where I thought “no, this isn’t right, it’s too out of nowhere,” but upon continuing I changed my mind. I love any story dealing in Greek Gods and the mythos and this has to have been one of the best I’ve ever read.

(I also loved Percy Jackson when I was younger but I remember having some serious issues with the lack of consequences for the Gods after the war with Kronos!)

Circe herself was great, and by the end I felt as if I knew Aiaia myself; as if I’d been there and walked the sandy shores, and explored the woods and rested at night in Circe’s cozy little house. Her own late homecoming was mine too. The selfishness of the gods and other deities, if portrayed by anyone other than the gods, would have come across as almost cartoonishly cold, but as I said, it’s the gods, so…

The way the characters Circe knows go from allies to enemies over and over and over again is painful. Every time you think, you wish, “here’s one who won’t betray her, here’s a solid friend”, and when it goes sour it somehow manages to hurt, despite you knowing that it was never going to work out. Her father, her brother, Hermes, Odysseus himself – they all go from being a comforting to antagonistic presence in some way (Odysseus from beyond the grave, props to that). Each time the pain manages to feel fresh, somehow.

Finally, with Circe’s son, and Penelope and her son, Circe gets the happy ending I had honestly begun to think was never going to happen. Freed from her wrongful exile, off to see the world while Penelope looks after Aiaia and her son rules his own kingdom, she’s finally free.

Review: A Clash of Kings. George RR Martin.

Originally written: 28/06/19. Contains spoilers.

As intricately written as I have come to expect from The Martin, all of the aSoIaF books take so much reading. I started Clash ahead of my 2019 reading schedule and finished three books behind.

Review: The Messenger of Athens. Anna Zouroudi.

Originally written: 17/06.19. Contains spoilers.

The first thing I’ll say is that the cover doesn’t quite match the rest of the book. Bright blue is the cover but grey and sombre is the tone of the book itself. The tone suits the story though. As I said, the cover is the only puzzle piece that is out of place.

A woman has been murdered, but the time locked, stuck in their ways islanders refuse to acknowledge this and call it a suicide. Hermes, a man sent form Athens, is there to discover Irini’s killer, and uncover the truth behind her untimely demise.

Review: A Game of Thrones. George RR Martin.

Originally written: 10/06/19. Warning! Contains spoilers.

When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies but the pack survives.

One thing that really struck me, beginning to end, is how true to the book the first season of the HBO adaptation was. I’ll have to see how this faithfulness fares as the books go on.

I had originally intended to the read the books first, as I normally do, but I got sucked into the show a while back and I don’t like to read something and watch it at the same time, so I sucked it up and waited for the show to be over and done with before I dove into A Song of Ice & Fire. After that finale, I wish I hadn’t bothered.

Sorta-Review: Daisy Jones & The Six. Taylor Jenkins Reid.

Originally written: 10/06/19. Contains spoilers.

In truth, I’m not sure what to write this time. Or if I should write anything at all. In my personal notebook I wrote quite the essay on this book, but the internet is a different beast entirely, and I certainly wouldn’t want any fans of this book to think I’m dissing the author, because I’m not. I have nothing against Reid. But I just –

I will say this: Daisy Jones was my first DNF (Did Not Finish) of the year. I’m afraid to say I really didn’t like this book. This came as a great disappointment, because I had been so excited by the premise of the book that I was almost bursting when I finally opened it up.

Review: The Outsider. Stephen King.

Originally written: 30/09/19. Contains spoilers!

I can’t say I’ve read all of King’s back catalogue, or even most of it; that’s going to take me a while yet. Even so, I think this might be one of his best standalone offerings. Emotional, intriguing, hard to put down. That, to me, is what encapsulates all of his best work. I have to say, though, that once Terry Maitland was murdered, almost halfway through, most if not all of the novel’s delicious tension, the urgency which had up until that point left me breathless (and sleepless), vanished. Which I think is a shame.

Were I the writer of the book (ha!), I think I would have found a way to keep Maitland alive until about three quarters of the way through. I would have held him in danger but had him in imminent danger of something (lets say he was given the death sentence) and then just as the ghoulbusters made some kind of breakthrough, I would have had him murdered. The tragedy of what happened to him would remain but the tension wouldn’t be killed quite so quickly.

A phenomena I’ve encountered while reading King in the past happened again. Let me explain.

If you’ve read my Doctor Sleep review, you’ll now that I didn’t like Abra’s parents at all. They irritated me beyond belief, with their demands to know what was going on. They were her parents! Of course they would ask questions like that! Didn’t stop me from wanting them to fuck right off. The same thing happened while reading The Outsider, this time with Ralph Anderson’s wife, Jeannie.

She had no involvement to the plot, no insider knowledge on the case, as it were, so when she urged her husband to condemn a man that I, the reader, knew to be innocent, I wished I would magic her out of the story. Jeannie, unlike Abra’s parents, did eventually grow on me, but I think it’s interesting that it happened again.

Of course, I knew that I was reading a Stephen King book, so while the characters um-ed and ah-ed over who the real killer was (and Anderson reiterated fifty or so times that it “HAd tO Be MAitlAnD”), I knew it was going to some sort of supernatural creature, most likely a shapeshifter. What interested me was the way that the Outsider didn’t think of his crimes the way the human characters did (or so he claimed). He seemed to be genuinely offended when Holly called him a pedophile. Even evil has… er – standards?

I didn’t think the way that he died in the end was particularly thrilling, though a couple of the other character deaths got me, I’ll admit, but I’ve found before that with King, the endings can miss the mark, if not for me then for others. The way he chose to end his seminal Dark Tower series was, in my opinion, absolutely brilliant, but I know other fans who were disappointed by it, and I see why. (If you haven’t already, go read the Dark Tower books. They’re my favourites from King!)

At least we can say that in the end, Terry Maitland was acquitted, post-mortem, for what it’s worth. (And even if he was so over-the-top good that when he was alive he made me roll my eyes.)

This book made me think of  the way the accused are often treated. Because Anderson chose to publicly arrest him, Maitland went from Basically Jesus to Literally Hitler in a minute, and his wife was taken down with him by virtue of nothing more than being married to him. Supernatural aspects of the story aside, the idea that this could happen to you, to me, is very much real. Anyone can be falsely accused and once they are, that’s it. Even proven innocent, their life is ruined.

I always find with King, that there’s a little bit of dodgy dialogue. Dialogue that makes me say, “What? Who would say that?” This time was no exception, but I’ve come now to accept that it’s just another quirk of his writing. One of the heroes in the second half, middle-aged Holly, kept describing things as “very poopy” and I just… What? If there were a word that fully embodied the question mark, I would write it here.

Some questionable dialogue aside though, I loved this book. I feel I can definitively say that Stephen King has done it again.

Stephen King: The Writer’s Voice.

Contains spoilers for The Outsiders!

Stephen King is a master at telling a good story, weaving a thrilling yarn, but there’s something he does in his writing that I don’t think gets the attention it deserves; he has a highly distinct writer’s voice. No matter which novel of his you read, as soon as you get stuck into a King story, you know it’s one of his immediately.

I started thinking about this first when reading The Outsider. I’d just been talking to a friend about The Shining and how even when reading about grizzly murders, it felt like doing so with a friend. I realised that the same was true for The Outsider, and, thinking on it further, for all of the other King books I had read. I realised it was his writer’s voice that made me feel so at home when reading about child murder and monsters and *shudders* phantom wasp nests.

So lets talk about it.

I often see the question asked; what is a writers voice? Simpy put, it’s your mark on the work you do. It’s the voice that your readers can instantly recognise as yours, no matter the context. The phrasing and language and tone unique to you. Your writers voice is a tool that is unique to you. So if it’s another tool in the writers’ toolbox, how can you utilise it?

As mentioned before, Stephen King is a great example of a writer with voice. Anything he writes is unmistakably his, and in my opinion he is able to use his voice to write about topics other authors couldn’t; we trust King’s voice. In The Outsiders, the conflict is sparked off by a grizzly murder, the murder of a child in a very violent, grim fashion. Anyone else, I think, would struggle to win over readers with a basis such as this. With King, it works.

“How do I cultivate my own writer’s voice?” is another question I often see asked. By writing, is the answer. Don’t be scared to write the way you want to. Fuck rules and conventions, and Top Ten Things A Writer Must Never Ever Do lists. Just write, and don’t be scared to let your personality show in what you write. It might not be neat or tidy, it might even put people off at first, when your voice is still undeveloped, all clunky and new, but it will be yours, and it will get better.

Let your own voice develop and you might just be surprised by what you feel free to talk about. You might also be surprised by the ideas that strike you when you let yourself think completely freely.

I liken a distinct, developed writer’s voice to a friend. It’s like sitting around a crackling fire on a dark and stormy night with a friend, listening to stories of ghosts and creeps and things that go bump in the darkness. A good writer’s voice, in my opinion, is one that is not just the reader’s narrator through the story, but their companion as well.

This is why, to me, Stephen King’s talent is so enviable. It isn’t just the imagination that goes into his work, it’s the part of him that he pours into it as well. The part that can take a story about a group of old friends being killed in the woods and turn it into something you can read with a cup of tea on a cozy night.