Review of Gregory Maguire's "Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West"

(Written Dec. 1, 2011) 

When I got this book for my birthday back in 2002 and tried reading it, I wasn't able to pass the very first page. It annoyed and angered me. But since it had so many good reviews (and so many bad ones, as I discovered later on), I thought it wasn't my time and put it away for later perusal. 

Now, nine years later, I couldn’t put it down. This, I realized, wasn’t because this is such a great read, or because it’s such a good story. For one the language annoyed the hell out of me. I had to read several passages numerous times, and even then had a hard time understanding what the author was trying to say. I think he was trying to write in an older tongue, but I don’t see the reason for that. Was it because he wanted to make it more of a period piece? Because I'm positive he doesn't speak like that in life, no one in this century does or did in the 20th. I didn’t mind that there were words I had to look up in a dictionary, but I did mind that the language and the phrases were so coy, that they needed deciphering. 

I looked through some of the reviews on this book and realized that it got either “hate it” or “love it”. It’s not a very universal read. Lots of people, who like the musical, hated the book. I think it’s because the book and the musical are different entities now; very different in their genre, their style and their content. The book is philosophical and very dark. By ‘dark’ I don’t mean the story, I mean the journey the heronine of this book takes. 

I also disliked some of the strong sexual content in it, not because I’m close-minded (not at all), but because I didn't think  it added anything to the story. While some of the sexual scenes were necessary for the story and the book wouldn’t be without them, I thought most of it was there merely for shock value. 

All the way throughout the book I asked myself “would I recommend it to anyone?” I still don’t have an answer to that. But still, I went on. I wanted to see how it would tie up with "Wizard of Oz". 

This book didn’t demonstrate its advertised “how evil became evil” theory. But rather it showed the cause and the reasoning of doing what’s considered to be evil. It showed how often the evil we are presented with by the society isn’t evil at all; on the contrary the one that offers us this theory is the evil one. There was also the element of “what is evil to begin with?” which I think was the best part of the book. Indeed, what is evil? 

But one thing is for sure – this is a very readable book if you read it at the right time of your life. And so 3 stars. 

Review of Iraj Pezeshkzad's "My Uncle Napoleon"

(Written: July 15, 2010)

I loved this book. Funny, funny, funny. All of the characters are like real people you know. Although, this book is very specific to Iran and is set in pre-World War 2; you can encounter these characters anytime, anywhere.

My hat is off to the author for making me laugh and be irritated, making me love some of the personages and feel sad for the others. And finally for making me feel nice warm sorrow at the end.

The author very well portrays the "out-dated", "old-fashioned" and mostly idiotic way "traditional" folk deal with issues and non-issues. They mostly do it by Making a mountain out of anthill.

A book that was so close to my heart, since (even though Armenia is pretty modern) there are still people around me who think that "honor of the family" in other people's eyes is more important than right and wrong, love and marriage, health, life, death. Nothing matters, but what outsiders think of "you" and "your family". And no one really listens to one another. Tricks, plots, jokes; jokes, plots and tricks.

And the author shows all this with light in his heart and a smile on his face.

Well done! 4 stars.

Review of Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight (Twilight, #1)"

(Written: March 11, 2010)

Ah... I'm on page 20-something and it's already bad. After reading China Mieville's "Perdido Street Station" which was written in such rich, eloquent and smart language - this seems like 1st grade's worst student's worst writing.

I guess people like the story?... In that case I would say - this story is so sentimental and "sweet" that it makes my teeth grind.

I don't know if I'll be able to finish it. We'll see...

(Continued: March 21, 2010)

I'm much further in the book, and yep, it's official, the writer's vocabulary is poor and uninventive as are the characters. Most of the scenes are comprised of ordinary, mundane and simple recounting of who did what. It's all "she sat, he stood, he said, she thought".  While the whole story can be dscribed in one sentence "I love you, but I can't, you love me, but you can't, others want us not to love each other". That's all. There is no philosophy. Edward is supposed to be an old soul (literally), yet he uses the same primitive language, the other characters do. The most "fancy" word in this book is... I don't know "chagrin". It seems as if the author (I don't dare say "writer", sorry) only used about 500 English words in the whole 381 pages (that's where I'm at). That's counting "the"s, "she"s and "and"s. That's not literature, that's...

The story is like a really-really-really late night really lame soap, that one day you stumbled upon and watched for whatever reason, and now you are hooked on it. Now you want to know what happened to these characters. It's like a train wreck: you want to stop watching, but you can't, you're captivated, even though you don't want to be. Hence the 2 stars in the rating.

Otherwise, it's dreadful.  

Review of China Miéville's "Perdido Street Station"

(Written: March 10, 2010)

WARNING: This review probably contains some (but not many) spoilers.

OK. Where to begin. This steampunk book swallowed me for 3 weeks. Its language eloquent, gory, eery, bloody, so particular, so intricate, so twisty, violent and... beautiful. Some passages took my breath away.

"The god to which [the monastery] was consecrated died. Some people come at night to honour the dead god's ghost. What tenuous, desperate theology".

This is how the whole book is written. If you are a man of a simpler language, beware. This book needs a dictionary next to it. It's very pleasant to indulge in such rich, wild tongue. The author treats his reader as a very smart reader, therefore the book has some figuring out to do.

The characters... the mythological creatures made alive. A new world complete with its own days of the week and month names, their own continents, cities. It's complete with rules, laws, "there is no spoon" kind of reality. Their reality - is their own. At times I thought I was overwhelmed, at times I didn't want to see so much of the city. (There are a lot of descriptions of places). The last sentence of the whole book a bit killed it for me. It felt like it was from a different novel all together. It so didn't belong at the end of this one, that I'm rewriting it for myself and will consider THAT to be the true ending sentence.

I've always been a fan of stories that are true to life and this book is one of those. It's not a fantasy that's idealized, romanticized, it's not made pretty or pink or fluffy. It doesn't have a good end, it doesn't have an end at all - it just continues as life would. No one wins in the end. But something happens with you, the reader.

There is so much unexplained, but it's very congruent with the world the author created. People were "lost" and tears were shed. The sexual dance in the air... it was so pretty and ugly and "forbidden" and lustful... and beautifully written.  At the end of the book I felt really sad, I wanted the characters to win... (sigh)

So... I will close off with another excerpt from the book:

"The dream-poison of the slake-moths is sinking slowly through aether and on into the earth. [...:] It drifts like polluted snow through the planes that entangle the city, on through layers of materia, leeching out of our dimension & away".

Isn't that just beautiful?

4 stars

Review of Yann Martel's "Life of Pi"

(Written: Sept. 1, 2008)

The ending was SO powerful, that I'm being haunted by the book now. It raised so many questions, that I had to go to Wikipedia and read a little about it, which in its turn raised even more questions, more powerful, more meaningful, more haunting...

So... even though I didn't think I would (while reading it), now I give it 5 stars

WARNING: spoilers!!!!

First of all: this is a fictional story. That ought to be taken into consideration...

While I was reading it I felt that the author was somewhat detached from Pi himself. And that I didn't like. But as I read on, I really started thinking about my own perspective on life, how do I live it, what would I do in his situation, would I just lay there and die, give in; or do all the things he did to survive? Hmmm....

When at the end he asks the Japanese men: "which story do you prefer?" I believe he's asking the reader: "How do YOU perceive life? Are you a pessimist, a romantic, an optimist? Would you rather be with humans, who very often act so inhumane, animalistic; or with a tiger, who is 'less' intelligent, yet doesn't overthink everything to a point of losing his purpose on Earth, his function?"

I'm being haunted by this book and that's already good.

So... Which one are you? Which story do you chose? I trust that they are both true depending on YOU, the human, the reader. I, sadly, have to say that for me the second story seems to be the true one, although, I'm trying to believe (with all my might) that the first one, with the animals, is the real one. Because it's more romantic and well... "better"...

5 stars for the way it made me feel.        

Review of Douglas Adams' "The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

(Written: July 2, 2011)

A very exciting and strange read. It’s very British: the humor, the style, the context, it's very FUNNY, and it's very well written. In fact, it's so well written that you want to quote every single sentence. Literally. The book is over 800 pages long, so imagine the amount of quotes it contains.

Since this was a radio show & was broken into periodic radio casts, the listener had time to digest and rest from it. Reading it as a book is a different matter: at times I got really tired of his style, even though I did see how clever and creative it was: too much of anything is never good. Some parts of it even got me a bit annoyed, but again, maybe because I was reading it as a whole, without breaks.

For any reader that’s looking for a "linear" plot and less “English-ness” - maybe you should reconsider reading it altogether.

But most of all I liked seeing how Douglas Adams grew as a person throughout his work. The last two books became less, per say, “funny” and more profound. Very profound. He stopped making me laugh as much; instead he made me think on life more, dishing out aphorism after aphorism, without breaking his style or the language.

That’s a very hard thing to do. Bravo. 4 stars.  

Review of Orhan Pamuk's "Cevdet Bey and His Sons"

(Written: Aug. 30, 2011)

This book took about 300 pages to actually start (SIGN). I had to force myself to read it, just because I don't like unfinished books. Until about page 300 it merely recounted everyday facts "he went here, he drank tea, he thought what a boring man, the street was empty, he took a carriage, he snoozed for a bit..."

Then somewhere in the vicinity of page 320 the book actually started saying something. Only then did it become remotely interesting to see what it had to say, what it was actually written for.

The book jumped 30 years here, 3 months there, leaving created characters in the air without any explanation. Then later one of the personages would quite clumsily recount a few facts of what had happened in that time.

I know the writer got his Noble prize for "discovering new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures",  but for this book he could only get one award: award of never-ending exposition.

Although, in places I liked the writer's style, and I will try his other works like "My name is Red", I rate this book with one-and-a-half stars only - and that's plenty, I'd say.