Patrick Ness - A Monster Calls and The Chaos Walking trilogy

In the last 6 months I have become a huge fan of Patrick Ness. I have now read 4 of his books - the truly incredible A Monster Calls was the first. It is a book that he wrote based on an idea by Siobhan Dowd who died from cancer before she could write it herself. I don't want to give too much away about the plot but it is based around a young boy's experience of his mum being seriously ill, how he is processing this and visits from a monster! It is incredibly emotional and emotive but not without humour. It isn't a difficult read and is short enough to read in one or two sessions (approximately 200 pages and the version I read was illustrated a bit like a graphic novel). It would probably be very good as a "life situations" book without being "worthy and boring". Basically I thought it was amazing.

I have just finished reading Ness' Chaos Walking trilogy. While all of the books are brilliant I personally found the first book The Knife of Never Letting Go the best and most original read. The story is of Todd Hewitt, the only boy in a town of men (no women - you'll have to read it to find out what happened to them) where everybody can hear everything that everyone thinks (including animals) due to the 'disease' Noise. When Todd has to leave he soon meets Viola and they go on an amazing journey together as they run away from the men of Prentisstown. It is a story of great heroism and friendship written (or so it feels) at an incredible pace - a proper page-turner.

By the time of the second book in the series The Ask and The Answer Todd and Viola have reached the town of Haven but Viola has been seriously injured and they now find themselves separated and stuck in the middle of a power struggle between The Ask and The Answer and both being forced into situations where it is impossible to do the right thing - there are some real moral issues. We also find out far more about the natives of the planet called The Spackle. One of the things I really love about these books is the way they swap between characters narrating the story so you are constantly viewing the story and the actions of the characters from different perspectives.

The final part of the trilogy is Monsters of Men and the action is pretty much continuous - I don't know if this could ever be a film because at points it just seems too intense and non-stop (at some points I had to put the book down just to give myself time to recover). By this point we are constantly seeing the story from three different perspectives as war breaks out between 3 different groups now including The Land led by The Sky. The main characters are constantly treading on a fine line between good and evil as war (as the title suggests) makes monsters of men.

Read the whole lot - I can't recommend them highly enough.

Top 10 albums of 2012/13 so far - my opinion

At last somewhere where I can throw my opinions out to the world on music. I may of course find this difficult as I don't like it when people disagree (my wife thinks that I'm pretty pretentious and precious about music) but what the hey! Rather than start by reviewing an album I thought I'd do something I've always wanted to do and do a top 10 list! The following is a personal list of the best new albums added to the Library Catalogue in the last 12 months (I should have known that I wouldn't have been able to keep it down to 10!):

• Antony & the Johnsons - Cut the World
• Bat for Lashes - The Haunted Man
• Paul Buchanan - Mid Air
• Beach House - Bloom
• Cat Power - Sun
• Crystal Castles - III
• First Aid Kit - The Lion's Roar
• Grizzly Bear - Shields
• Richard Hawley - Standing at the Sky's Edge
• Lambchop - Mr.M
• The Lumineers - The Lumineers
• Mumford and Sons - Babel
• Of Monsters and Men - My Head is an Animal
• Lucy Rose - Like I Used To
• Sigur Ros - Valtari
• Tindersticks - The Something Rain
• The xx - Coexist
• Lana Del Rey - Born to Die

Avengers Assemble, The Amazing Spider-Man and The Dark Knight Rises

I have to say that I was beginning to think that you could have too many comic-book hero films until I saw three films in recent months all of which blew me away in their own quite different way - Avengers Assemble, The Dark Knight Rises and The Amazing Spiderman.

I loved the first two Sam Raimi Spider-Man films and thought they had probably taken it about as far as it was possible to go (witness film 3!). Not true - this is absolutely brilliant - a fantastic story-line with just the right amount of action without going too far down the road of over-relying on CGI rather than plot. Importantly to me young British actor Andrew Garfield plays Spidey this time (I thought he was amazing in Red Riding) and I do like a proper actor playing my super-heroes!!

Robert Downey Jr is enough to make me try most films but I didn't really have massive hopes for the Avengers Assemble film and I just put it on one Saturday evening when really I was too tired to watch a film and wanted to watch something that I didn't care if I fell asleep while watching it. I know, I know - what an interesting and dynamic Saturday night-life I must have! Ignoring that thought I have to say that again this was fantastic - quite a bit more comedy than Spider-Man or Batman but oh my god the action!

The main criticism I'd heard about this was that you couldn't tell what the main villain Bane was saying due to his Hannibal Lector style face mask but I really don't understand that - I could understand him just fine (again a young British actor giving gravitas to a role - this time, Tom Hardy beefed up just like in Bronson). This is a very long film (160 mins) but it flew by. I just love how dark and grim these films are - far more my thing than the camp sixties TV show or indeed the Tim Burton versions although Batman Returns was pretty cool at the time. A fitting end to the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy although for me nothing could beat the The Dark Knight but I did see that at the cinema and it's difficult to follow that Heath Ledger performance as The Joker!

At my mother's knee... and other low joints by Paul O'Grady

At my mother's knee... and other low joints As I have got older I have made some big decisions in my life (education, job, marriage, parenthood etc.) but one of the most important has been that if I don't like something (book, film, music) I just don't finish it. Unfortunately that conclusion has just been reached with this Paul O'Grady autobiography. Don't get me wrong - I love Paul O'Grady's sense of humour and would definitely describe him as seeming to be warm-hearted but this book is just plain boring. I really and truly expected to find myself laughing out loud and not wanting to put the book down but in actual fact I've hardly been able to bring myself to pick it up in the first place. Far too much information about his family and not enough stories about Mr O'Grady himself - I've had it for weeks and have now given up at page 136 - maybe it's fantastic from there on in but I'm never gonna find out...

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The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

I read The Book Thief by Markus Zusak a few years back now (and as such the details are slightly hazy) but as this is the first book club blog-type thing I have ever written and it is my favourite book I thought it was still the most appropriate place to begin. Review upon review upon review has been written on it (nearly 900 on Amazon alone when I last looked never mind all the 'professional' ones) so I'm going to keep this one short and personal.

I have to admit that there have been times in my life when I haven't read as much as I should but occasionally you take a punt on a book (I'd actually bought this for my wife) and once you start it is impossible to put it down. This book grabbed me emotionally in a way that I find difficult to describe. Suffice to say that if I had had a daughter I wanted to call her Liesel and that I found it difficult to read the last 40 pages as I was crying so much I could barely see them - I am very affected by acts of courage and loss!

Anyway - what do you think of The Book Thief and while you are thinking about that what other Modern Fiction books do you suggest we might want to discuss?

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The Other Queen by Philippa Gregory

As part of my duties to a book group that I'm helping out with but don't actually belong to I recently had to read The Other Queen by Philippa Gregory. I have to admit that the idea at first filled me with dread as everything about it "400+ pages of historical fiction set in Tudor times" screamed "this is not my cup of tea and I'm not going to like it and it's going to take forever to read and I'm not going to be able to talk about it without offending the group (6 elderly ladies that I'd never met before)!" However...

I actually thought it was great. Obviously if you know anything about Tudor England (I don't) you would expect this to be a novel that was full of politics, intrigue, plotting, sexual tension, love, murder, executions etc. It is full of all these things plus it cracks on at a great pace - it has very short chapters as the narrative keeps swapping between the 3 main characters - Mary, Queen of Scotts; Bess of Hardwick and her husband the George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury and although even I knew how it was all going to end it still keeps you interested right up to the (bloody) end.

Of course I've no idea whether or not it's particularly historically accurate and I'm sure that probably matters to a lot of people (not me though) but it is fiction and from what the author says in the notes at the back it's pretty well researched and nobody is going to know exactly what happened so she is as likely to be right as anyone else from what I can tell.

All in all a big thumbs up for a book I really thought I'd hate. Just goes to show you shouldn't judge a book by it's cover! Boom Boom...

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The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson

An absolutely astonishing book. I loved everything about The Gargoyle - from the appearance of the pages (black to signify that the book has been burned along with the author) to the plot; the use of different timelines; the characters; the short tales told by Marianne Engel within the book. The way everything ties together in life.

I have to admit/warn you that the first few chapters contain some of the most disturbing images that I have had bought to mind by a book and it seemed initially that this was going to be a pretty tough read. Fascinating yes but pretty unpleasant. Due to the vividness of the descriptions you could all but physically feel the pain that the author is going through during the accident and then, even worse, during the treatment. I presume also that the treatments described are all real which gives it all an added edge.

At it's heart though this is actually a story of love and redemption for a modern day self-hating pornographer (we've all been there!!). A man who I have only just realised while writing this is never named (it's amazing how I missed that - guess I was just too engrossed from the outset and then it was never important).

 I would definitely recommend the book but possibly only to a selected audience purely due to the need for a strong stomach at points although if you can get past those there's a lot of heart in there.

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The World is Burning and I Love You! Dystopian Teen Fiction

The recent onslaught of young adult books set in worlds on the brink of collapse thrills some readers and leaves others cold. What do you think?

Here are some (relatively) recent teen titles:
Delirium by Lauren Oliver
The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins
The Forest of Hands and Teeth (and its two sequels) by Carrie Ryan (zombie dystopia!)
The Enemy (and its sequels) by Charlie Higson (zombies in this one too!)
Matched by Ally Condie
Uglies by Scott Westerfeld

Do you love dystopian novels? Hate them? Which one is your favourite? Do you think their societies are outlandish or totally believable?