Ivanhoe, Ivanhoe, Wherefore Art Thou Ivanhoe?

Proud Nana

I’m half way through Ivanhoe, and so far we’ve barely met him.  We know that he was a knight in the Crusades and he is the childhood sweetheart of Rowena, the ward of Cedric the Saxon.  He won the tournament registered only as the ‘Disinherited Knight’, was benevolent with his winnings, and being wounded he collapsed, and is now unconscious on Isaac the Jew’s litter and has been caught up with that parties’ kidnapping.  I’m wondering if the story is about Wilfred of Ivanhoe or if Ivanhoe is the area in which all this adventure is taking place?!

There have been some interesting things to note though.  One of them is that Cedric only became a name since this story.  Scott actually misspelt it, and the correct name should have been Cerdic.  The other is that I finally know who Rowena and Rebecca are.  Thackeray wrote a satire based on these two characters so I will have to put it on my list of books to read. I loved his Vanity Fair.

My Kindle arrived, but I don’t have time to play with yet as I’m enjoying seeing my daughter and her family.  I wish our Gold Coast weather could be kinder; it’s not nice being washed out at the theme parks.  Last night we enjoyed dinner together at Outback Jacks and apart from the cook mixing up the meals and giving my son-in-law the tiniest steak in history, it was pretty good.

I received an iPod Classic from my son, via my daughter, preloaded with all his favourite music (his taste is the same as mine), TV shows and videos.  He called me a few nights ago and told me to listen to the Kick Ass soundtrack first as there was a track on there he loved.  It turned to be This Town Aint Big Enough For the Both of Us.  I told him that was Sparks, a bit of a blast from the past for me; I used to really like them when they were big in the UK.  I told him my favourite song of theirs was No. 1 Song in Heaven but that I’d been unable to find a copy for download.  When I switched on the iPod there it was, the first track to listen to (isn’t he a sweetie!), and now I’ve listened to that song about 50 times since last night!  It’s just as good as I remembered it.

Anyway, back to books: I’ve read 100 pages of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, it’s got my attention but I don’t quite have the time to read a physical book this week so will put it to one side and enjoy the family first.

Oh, and I’m still going with Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince! I’m about half way through it but as I’m only listening to bits here and there I’m not too sure where I’m at plotline wise.  I’ll have to recap this one too like I’ve recapped Ivanhoe.  Forces are conspiring against me to make sure that I won’t have time to reach this year’s target from the 1001 list; I’ll have to make sure the next few selections are no more than 200 pages each!!  

A Summary of Our Second Birthday

Sunday was Caffeine and Chapters Social Book Club's second birthday. Our first birthday passed us by without us realising that we had hit a milestone, so we certainly celebrated in style this year!

Afternoon Tea

Our hostess, Robyn C. laid out a lovely afternoon tea complete with gorgeous china and pastel serviettes.  We spend some time outside talking about e-books and Kindles (the courier rang me this morning and mine is being delivered tomorrow - yippee!).  After enjoying some nibbles and some refreshing punch, we retired to the lounge to watch Valentino: The Last Emperor in honour of the touring Valentino collection (which I must try and see in Brisbane before it finishes).  We dressed to a Valentino theme which was fun, and thanks to Robyn for completing my pathetic effort with a gorgeous red fascinator.  

I enjoyed the movie/documentary much more than I expected and didn't realise just how beautiful some of Valentino's dresses are and that they are all hand sewn.  Absolutely stunning.  

The Cake

The highlight of our afternoon was this beautiful cake, which Helen (our newest member) brought in.  Decorated by Helen's daughter, it just about blew us away, and it was a real shame to take it apart so that we could eat it!

After exchanging gifts of books, and bookmarks, the dream was over and it was back to reality going home and trying to work off all those calories!

We didn't get much book discussion done, but that will give us more to talk about for October's meeting.  I've read a little bit of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, so will make a concerted effort to get stuck  into it this week.  I'm also continuing with Ivanhoe, but have been a bit distracted so need to go back a disc and listen to it properly!

Gotta go and work off some more calories now as I had more cake when I got home for tea last night!  

The Knight's Bones are Dust and his Good Sword Rust

Enjoying Ivanhoe

I’ve had a bit of an unsettled week this week resulting in late nights and no reading or blogging – it’s been very frustrating.

The power adaptor for my Kindle arrived Wednesday and my Kindle is also on it’s way.  I’m a bit concerned as I wasn’t home when the adaptor was delivered and it was just left on the boot of my other half’s car in the driveway!! I rang the courier stating I want my next package put in a safe spot or delivered to my work address and whilst the girl was very pleasant she wasn’t very helpful so who knows where it’s going to get delivered.

To top it all, last night someone tried to break into my house. I called the police, mainly because I thought they should know that there may be someone in the area looking for easy pickings, I knew they couldn’t really do anything.  They came out pretty promptly and were really nice and helpful but I was still a bit nervous leaving the house today.  On the upside I got to know my neighbour across the road as I thought I’d ask if she'd seen anything, which she hadn’t, but we had a really nice chat (we’ve both lived here for 10 years and it’s the first time we’ve spoken!!).

Anyway, I’m up to Disc Three of Ivanhoe now and wonder why I believed Scott’s novels were hard to read.  I love his writing, yes the language is a little archaic (it was written in 1819), and it would be even more so if he’d have tried to write it in the Norman and Saxon languages of the time Ivanhoe is set, but it’s just wonderful.

I’m pleased that I had the foresight to do a bit of research on the book as Scott is well known for his historical accuracy; however it transpires that in Ivanhoe he has taken a bit of licence here and there.  For example Ivanhoe’s Robin Hood is very different from the real one, and his version is the one that Hollywood has made legend.  But he was also prescient in the case of Richard the Lionheart.  His view that he did not much care for his subjects and was more of a selfish adventurer (shades of Che?) is now considered to be the truth by modern historians.

So with this knowledge in mind, I shall just sit back and enjoy the characterisations in this loosely ‘historical’ romantic adventure.

One of the chapter headings, contains the last three lines of the poem The Knight's Tomb by  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) .  It's been driving me mad but I have read those three lines before recently in another novel but can't for the life of me remember which one, but when I heard them this morning I remembered I really liked them.  The whole poem itself is lovely so here it is:

The Knight’s Tomb

Where is the grave of Sir Arthur O’Kellyn?

Where may the grave of that good man be?--

By the side of a spring, on the breast of Helvellyn,

Under the twigs of a young birch tree!

The oak that in summer was sweet to hear,

And rustled its leaves in the fall of the year,

And whistled and roared in the winter alone,

Is gone,--and the birch in its stead is grown.--

The Knight's bones are dust,

And his good sword rust;--

His soul is with the saints, I trust.

I finished Nightmare at 20, 000 Feet by Matheson.  There were some great stories, some good stories and some predictable stories.  For the most part the ideas were really good, but the delivery isn’t great and most of the dialogue is very stilted (I found this to be the case with Somewhere in Time too).  It just doesn’t flow from him like say Stephen King – he just has dialogue, not conversations….. it’s weird and a bit off putting.  Some of the stories were pretty good, but then I’d get to the last last line and I’d think ‘why did he write that? The story was fine without it’……….. it would kind of ‘blunt’ the story somehow.  I’ll have a rest from him now, as I picked up  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo from the library last night – I wonder if I hadn’t have stopped in there I may have caught the louse trying to break in.  Though maybe that may not have been a good thing.

Caffeine and Chapters Social Book Club will be celebrating its 2^nd birthday in style.  We’re having a Valentino dress theme, and enjoying the hospitality of one of our members on Sunday.  We’re also hoping to watch the Valentino movie, and maybe talk books too!

Here’s hoping for a dry weekend for a change……

I'v Done it Again!

I can't believe it, I've wasted my download and got yet another play!  The Maltese Falcon I'm talking about.  I tried listening to it but couldn't get past the heavy American accents.   Besides, it has to be the book to be crossed off the list.  Not happy Jan!  I had to listen to the radio on the way home.....

So, I'm now uploading Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott instead.  I've wanted to read Walter Scott since listening to Whales for the Wizard by Malcom Archibald.  Hopefully it won't be hard going, but it will be another one to cross of the list.

I finished Carry Me Down, it was absolutely fantastic BUT I don't get the ending.  I listened to it three times, and I just don't get (like I didn't get the ending to No Country for Old Men).  It just doesn't make sense, and after getting to know John Egan and all those subtle hints into his dis-associative personality, the family's problems, his attempted murder of his mother..... there was no ending.  How did it END?  What happened to him?  What was the point of it?   What about the doll in the tree?  Aaaaagh, I need to know.  Don't let it put you off reading it though, it's very insightful into the nuances of an unstable mined.

Nothing more to write, just wanted to whinge about my lack of attention with my book selections!

A Little Bit of This and a Little Bit of That

Well that’s another weekend done and dusted.  Today was wet, so I spent it reading a little bit of this and a little bit of that……...

I awoke about 8.30am this morning, after being snubbed by my cats all night despite frantic calls around 1am when I thought if I could have a least one of them on my bed I’d feel ‘safer’!!  (Damn those ghost stories).  It was to no avail however, if there’s nothing in it for them - they’re not interested.  Not wanting to get up right away I thought I’d polish off a couple more stories from the Matheson collection – Wet Straw which was a ghostly revenge story and Dance of the Dead which was set after WWIII (this one was particularly creepy).  The next one is The Children of Noah, which I’ll probably read tonight.

Tenshi
(oblivious to her mistress in need)

I breakfasted on English Muffins with ginger marmalade and a cup of coffee, and then tackled my ironing whilst listening to more of Carry Me Down.  Things have gone from bad to worse for John Egan.  His father hit the grandmother and she kicked them out of her home; though, John does not know the reason at the time and drives his parent mad with his questions.  They go to Dublin and are given a council flat on a dreary estate where John is bullied by the local gang.  John’s father gets a job in a factory and things look like they could work out but one night John smells perfume on him and accuses him of 'being dirty' with the girls in the flat upstairs. His father is drunk and he denies it, but later John tells his mother of his suspicions.  One day she acts upon them, and they are confirmed, which results in his father being asked to leave. Unfortunately being the family that they are John is made out to be the bad guy ie he should have kept his mouth shut.

John’s mother falls into a deep depression and is unable to sleep.  One day she promises she will take John to the zoo but breaks the promise.  This is just one more broken promise in a long line in John’s life.  The breaking point comes when she does finally fall asleep and John straddles her and presses a pillow to her face.  When she stops struggling, he thinks he has killed her but shows no feelings, he is just numb, but he later hears her coughing and choking. When questioned by the Guarda and a child psychologist John says he just wanted to help her sleep.  John is taken to a boy’s home, and as usual my iPod let me down and I’m now waiting for it to charge so that I can finish it!  It’s been a compulsive read, strange, but compelling because it is told from the boy’s point of view.  He’s not really a bad kid, it’s the people he’s had around him and raising him that are the real problem.   

After lunch (BBQ chicken and bread rolls) I listened to some more Harry Potter and the Half -Blood Prince.  Harry’s learning some background about Tom Riddle via the Pensive with his Head Master, and he’s convinced that Malfoy is now a death-eater, although he’s yet to sway anyone else to his way of thinking.  I went onto Overdrive to see if my two holds were still available, I haven’t got much download left this month so one of them (2666) will have to be booked for another time, but I did however download The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett.  This book is on the 1001 list and has also been mentioned in a few books that I have read recently so as soon as I have finished Carry me Down that will be my next audio read.

OMG I forgot to mention my BIG news!  I was driving my other half mad last night going on and on about how great it would be to have a Kindle, that I have one on my Amazon wish list, and how I would download all those great classics ……. he was half asleep on the couch after wiping himself out with a pack of Pikelets and half a jar of jam and said if I wanted it so much why didn’t I just buy it.  So I thought there was some sense in that and said I would probably get it as a Christmas present to myself.  He said just get it and it’ll be an early Christmas present from him.  So I took advantage of his half comatose state and bought it!  It should arrive by the end of the month, or early October.  Woo hoo!

That brings my reading up to date, so until next time......

How Could I Have Been So Wrong?!

I can’t put Carry me Down down!  It’s a wonderful piece of story telling, a story of a young boy’s angst.  Maybe it will be sinister, but the tone I felt at the beginning is not there now.  Poor John, because he’s so much bigger than other boys his age, he’s expected to behave more like an adult.  However, he’s only 11 going on 12 and still has childish yearnings.

John is convinced that he is a human lie detector.  He first notices this when his father kills their cat’s kittens and he tells John that it does not upset him as it’s no different than what farmers have to do every day to feed them.  But John vomits, his ears burn and he knows that his father is lying.  Every time someone close to him tells a lie this happens.  He starts to keep track of everyone’s lies is his ‘Gol of Seil’ (Log of Lies) and fantasises about being picked up at the airport on his way to Niagara Falls (his dream holiday) by the people from the Guinness Book of Records and being introduced to Mr Ripley from Ripley’s Believe it or Not in order to show off his original talent.  He even writes to the Guinness Book of Records asking them to contact him so that he can demonstrate his 100% success rate in detecting a lie.

In the meantime his only friend has ditched him for the new girl in class, and she bullies John constantly about the time he wet himself.  He tells her that it was an experiment to see how long he could hold himself so that he could get into the Guinness Book of Records.

John’s parents are estranging themselves from him.  They tell John that they are concerned about his abnormal growth but his mother also has worries of her own the main one being his father’s lack of work.  There are some quite funny remarks/jokes between the boy and his parents, and whilst they are funny they are also a bit bizarre and you wonder really what sort of upbringing he has had with these people.

One day John goes to school to find that his teacher is sick and there will be a substitute teacher by the name of Mr Roach.  John takes to him instantly and wants to tell him about his lie detection.  When he approaches Mr Roach to ask him if he can get any books on the history of lie detection from America Mr Roach is sidetracked by the fact that the school does not even have a library.  The next day he sets up an ‘imaginary library’ with a box of Reader’s Digest, a table and a set of red curtains.  The students must line up, ring the bell and step into the ‘library’ and request a book.  A Readers Digest is then labelled with the book title and Mr Roach will use these titles in his request for a real library.  The students must take their ‘book’ home and write a summary onf their imaginary book.  

John requests a book on Vikings and he can’t wait to get home to get started on the summary. The next day he has to read his summary to the class and the teacher then tells them all about the Vikings.  The next day the new girl Kate requests a book on how to stop bed wetting for her ‘brother’. John is mortified……. and that is as far as I have got.

I must mention too, as this is also the cover image, that on the track where John walks to and from school, there is a tree and in this tree a doll has been stuck for many years.  The head is blackened, and he promises every time that he sees her he will get her down. 

I’m really impressed with the insights into John’s feelings and can almost identify with him at school with the bullying.  I was bullied mercilessly by a girl called Tina Pearson when I was at primary school, she wouldn’t let me pass the gate to go home and would pull my hair, kick my shins and call me names.  I used to bribe her with bags of marbles so that she would leave me alone! I often wonder what she’s like now.  Obviously she wasn’t a particularly happy child, which is pretty sad in hindsight.

I Love Starting a New Book!

It’s lovely to start a new book isn’t it?  I always look forward to it with relish.  I finished Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and I’ve started listening to Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.  At first I thought I was reading it out of order, the beginning in the Prime Minister’s office threw me a little bit until I realised it was a recap of previous events. 

Fred and George have their own shop in Diagon Alley now, which the gang visit whilst picking up requirements from their book lists.  Hermione finds a charm that guarantees day dreams – the side effects however include ‘vacant expression’ and ‘minor drooling’.  I love it!  Harry has been made Captain of the Quidditch team, which gives him the same rights as Prefects, so………so far so happy. 

The Time Traveller’s Wife has finally started to get my attention so now it’s been elevated to my lunchtime book and I even managed to read a few pages today.  I still have to stop and think sometimes, especially with lines like “I met Clare for the first time in October 1991.  She met me for the first time in September, 1977; she was six, I will be thirty eight.  She’s known me for all her life.  In 1991 I’m just getting to know her.”

Thank You Jeeves was a great disappointment – it was only 4 discs long and I wanted MORE!! I loved it of course.  Another one off the list – that’s two already this week. Actually I’ve had a bit of a panic attack as I only realised last night that it’s now mid September and I still have to knock off another 8 to reach my yearly target (as well as read my other books!).

Still reading through the Matheson short stories, my favourite from this batch I think so far is Disappearing Act. The narrator is finding that all the people he has known in his life are being erased from existence one by one……..will he or won’t he be next?

For my drive to and from work I’ve just started listening to Carry me Down by M J Hyland.  It has an Irish narrator which really lends a ‘feel’ to this book as it is set near Dublin.  It’s obviously going to be quite sinister, and there is a shocking murder scene involving kittens at the beginning.  I had to keep repeating to myself ‘it’s only a story, it’s only a story’.  It was quite graphic and upsetting (especially for a cat lover like me).  Yes, I could have skipped it but it may have some relevance to the story later on so I had to bear it.  Basically so far we can ascertain that the story is being narrated by an 11 year old boy.  His mum is 37 and his dad 38, both of whom (he tells us) are very good looking people and he believes that they must feel disappointment with him as he is very tall for his age, with a large nose, and his voice has already broken.  When talking with his parents he likes to study them and his mind will wander a bit only to be brought back to attention by the parent wanting to know what he is staring at.  His mother admonishes him a couple of times in the first chapters that this staring is unnerving.  There is also an underlying inference that the boy and his mum may be unnaturally close….?

The boy’s father doesn’t work, but he is apparently studying for the Trinity entrance exam, and as such they all live together with the boy’s grandmother in her home about two hours from Dublin.

The boy is fascinated with The Guinness Book of Records; he has every copy except the 1959 issue, and refers to it all the time.  I don’t want to Google the premise as it could ruin the plot line for me, but it appears that the boy will do something that he hopes will get him into the book….and it may not be very nice?  M J Hyland wrote How the Light Gets In which is on the 1001 list, so I may have to book a copy of that soon as so far I like the way she writes.