nevernotmoaning

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey has never been a book I've been drawn to. But a reading challenge threw it in my path - and it turns out, it's amazing!
The writing is exquisite - beautiful, haunting, massively impactful.
The book is also funny, which I wasn't expecting, as well as very sad and powerful, which I was.
The characterisation is masterful, the narrative voice (and the voices of a lot of the characters) is very effective and distinct.
I was completely immersed and especially mesmerised by the last 30 or so pages, which will stay with me a long time.
So glad I read this!


The Pastor's Wife by Elizabeth von Arnim, on the other hand, didn't really grab me at all.
We follow Ingeborg, who escapes her oppressive family and goes on an impromptu trip to Lucerne, and ends up marrying one of her fellow travelers and disappearing off to America.
I found the font very off-putting and the style very old-fashioned. There were lots of exclamation points and unnecessary italics. Ingeborg seemed very childish - and the man she gets involved with kept calling her 'Little One', which made me squirm.
So, I unfortunately gave up around the 50-page mark.

A Wedding in December by Anita Shreve tells the story of seven high school friends who reunite in their 40s when two of their number decide to get married.

As I have come to expect from Anita Shreve, it's a very interior story about people reflecting on their lives and having complicated inter-relationships with one another. There's also a story-within-the-story as one of the characters is writing a piece of fiction, which we get long extracts from. I found that story a bit tedious and difficult to connect to (as well as being very grim in aspects), and this also extended to the long letters various of the characters write throughout the book, and the lengthy 'big reveal' monologues towards the end.

I appreciated the acknowledgement that the versions of people we hold in our heads are likely not the same as the real people in a lot of ways. I also liked the whole arc following the two people getting married and was very satisfied with the conclusion of that. A lot of the rest of it was pretty dreary, though, (which was pointed out by the characters themselves!) and I wasn't keen on the apparent theme of setting aside the dreams and expectations of youth to accept the disappointments and practicalities of middle age.

Overall, the writing was good and there was a lot of well-observed detail about all the characters. But it didn't go anywhere particularly interesting and was largely a bit of a downer.


Last night, I went to a Jurassic Park-themed cabaret event at The Clapham Grand, called Life Finds A Slay. I was a bit apprehensive going in, but it ended up being a lot of fun. Some of it was (a lot) better than others, shall we say... Stand-outs were the performer who did a parody song about the experience of the little boy in the first film, and the stunning burlesque performer who did a great act as a velociraptor. The host was really good and I also unexpectedly enjoyed the audience-participation costume competition. Overall, an enjoyable night out and I'm glad I went.

I recently reread Mr Mercedes by Stephen King, as part of my Reviews Revisited series on my YouTube channel, not really remembering much about it before embarking - and I really enjoyed it!

I think listening to the audiobook helped because it's got one of my favourite audiobook narrators, who is very well suited to the material. Stephen King really knows how to write a story, and Will Patton really knows how to narrate one!

It's about a retired detective trying to bring to justice a mass killer who was part of one of his last cases, but it's not a 'whodunnit' but rather a 'how will they catch him' because we get the killer's POV from near the start so the reader knows who he is all along.

It's pretty unpleasant in places, but not so much as to be really off-putting - and the plot, pacing and tension are all really good. I liked the range of characters, particularly the two the detective recruits to help him in the second half.

I really wasn't expecting to enjoy this as much as I did - and I'm definitely going to carry on with the series.

I read Woman On The End of Time by Marge Piercey and found it very interesting, but felt it was more a treatise on the inequalities of society than a story.

He, She and It suffered from similar issues for me.

It's set in 2059, in a world where society has collapsed and several giant corporations have emerged to run and control everything.

The start of the actual story, where protagonist Shira loses custody of her two-year-old son and her ex-husband then takes him off-planet, was relatable and affecting, but didn't seem connected to the futuristic setting at all.

And around that was a huge amount of history, philosophy, world-building, politics, and heavy descriptive detail, which had some clever and fascinating aspects, but was very dense and took up about 75% of the narrative in the first few tens of pages.

When I found myself not wanting to read it, even in a doctor's waiting room when I had nothing else to do, I decided it was time to give up on it unfortunately.