2015: My Reading Year in Review

I read 20 books in 2015, a paltry number, half of what I read the year before, and fewer than the number of books I read in each of the years that my babies were born. If I can chalk this up to anything, it would likely be my job. In February of last year I started the first full-time job since Iggy arrived that is as mentally challenging and time-consuming as the work I used to do prior to the baby years. We also moved house in March. It was a busy year, but in the past that hasn’t stopped me reading. 2015 was different. I went into a bookstore in late summer last year and for the first time ever felt sad rather than inspired. I looked longingly at all the books I wanted to read and bought none of them. Picking one up and holding it in my hands, I wondered when I would ever have the time to read it.

As the year ticked over, something changed. I have started 2016 feeling like I have a grasp on my job and a workable routine going with the kids. My resolutions this year are not set down anywhere in writing, but they constitute a vague intention to nourish myself better in the months ahead: intellectually, with books, nutritionally, with food. To take advantage of this feeling of being a little more on top of things by pushing myself again to be the best I can be – to work out, to eat well, to stop drinking mid-week, to write regularly, to keep a neat house, to correspond better with friends.

Already, I have read one book this year and am reading two others. More on this later. For now, let me turn a last time to those books I did manage to read in 2015.

Of the 20 books I read, about four were chick lit read on holiday purely as a means to relax. One was a non-fiction business book, a requirement for my bookclub, and a few others were diverting but not worth dwelling on.

So, the books of note I read last year numbered twelve, and they were:

1. To Kill a Mockingbird: Harper Lee – a re-read. One of my favourite books in the world, a sentiment now confirmed as an adult reader.
2. Go Set a Watchman: Harper Lee – a fascinating insight into Lee’s writing process and the genesis of one the great American classic novels.
3. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Alice Munro – a wonderful selection of short stories by one of the very best story-writers, and Canada’s second Nobel Prize winner for literature.
4. This Book Will Save Your Life: A. M. Homes – a cult novel set in L.A., by one of my new favourite authors, in which a day-trader, Richard Novak, remembers through a series of bizarre events what it is to be human and connected to others.
5. Jeffrey Eugenides: Middlesex – the sweeping multi-generational tale of a family’s emigration from Greece to the United States and the story of the gene that turns narrator Calliope into Cal.
6. A Tale for the Time Being: Ruth Ozeki – a really beautiful story about sixteen-year-old Nao in Tokyo, her Buddhist nun aunt, and Ruth, a Japanese-American novelist living on a remote island in BC. This story wraps together a message in a bottle, quantum physics, Zen Buddhism, environmental consciousness, depression, the dot com crash, Proust, prostitution, theories of time and connectedness, and a little magic realism in a way that is moving rather than overwhelming or absurd.
7. The Girl on the Train: Paula Hawkins – a Hitchockian thriller by a female writer about a bitter young woman suffering from alcoholism in the wake of a seriously abusive relationship, and who is trying to solve a murder no one else realizes has taken place in circumstances where no one will believe anything she says.
8. Station Eleven: Emily St. John Mandel – other than To Kill a Mockingbird, perhaps the best book I read in 2015. This is a literary post-apocalyptic tale in which the story-telling jumps between present-day and a time twenty years after 99.9% of humanity has been wiped out by a pandemic flu. It is the first book in this genre I have read that has left me feeling uplifted, and it is as much about art and relationships as it is about a cataclysmic plague and its aftermath.
9. All the Light We Cannot See: Anthony Doerr – the other contender for best book of 2015, Doerr won the Pulitzer for this novel and deservedly so. A beautiful, moving story about a young blind French girl and a boy in the Hitler Youth during World War II.
10. The History of Love: Nicole Krauss – I have wanted to read this book for several years, and last year I finally got around to it but I made a grievous error: I listened to it as an audio book. The History of Love is an astonishing story about a precocious fourteen-year-old girl trying to find a new husband for her mother, and an old man who wrote a book many years earlier inspired by a girl he loved, and the events that connect these characters. It is made up of many different threads of narrative, and to do justice to it I will need to read it again, in hard copy.
11. Purity: Jonathan Franzen – Franzen’s first book after Freedom, I was desperate to read this but it fell a little flat. At its best, this is a novel about freedom of speech and journalistic integrity and a cult-ish Wikileaks-type project started by an East-German man whose passion for transparency lies in stark contrast with the secrets that lie at his core.
12. The Heart Goes Last: Margaret Atwood – Atwood’s latest is a return to form to her earlier writing. Though the book has Dystopian elements to it, it is unlike the MadAddam series in that the world is still recognizable as ours and the focus of the book is a relationship between husband and wife rather than survival of the human race. Peppered with the sardonic humour and feminist wit that caused me to fall for Atwood’s writing back when I first started reading her in the early ‘90s, this was an enjoyable romp of a book.

Here's to a 2016 with a broader, more diverse reading list and more mental energy to devote to the act of reading. 

A. M. Homes - This Book Will Save Your Life

I adored A. M. Homes's book May We Be Forgiven, and so I picked up this one - which has come to be known as a cult classic - with great anticipation. Unfortunately, This Book Will Save Your Life reads a little like the dress rehearsal for May We Be Forgiven, which was published 6 years later.  Had I read it first, I might have liked it better. And don't get me wrong - I did enjoy this book, but it doesn't have the finesse of Homes's later work.

Richard Novak is a wealthy trader in Los Angeles, living a life almost entirely independent of other people, until a health scare - unbearable, unlocalized pain - lands him in hospital and wakes him back up to the world. Over the course of the next months, he wrangles his way back into the lives of other people, performing acts of kindness for strangers, reconnecting with family members, and embracing the strangeness of life. Indeed, highly peculiar things happen to him in rather quick succession: a sinkhole forms outside his house and a horse falls into it, the Hollywood actor living above him rescues the horse by helicopter and cooks Richard dinner, he gets hit by a car, is treated by a fake doctor with remarkable insight, goes on silent retreat, saves one woman from a hapless marriage and another from almost certain death, becomes nationally known as "The Good Samaritan", rents a house in Malibu belonging to the mayor, and befriends the White Whale of the writing world, a decrepit fellow who wrote the last Great American Novel and might just be writing the next. In the midst of all this, Richard's abandoned son comes to stay. 

Interspersed in the bizarre turnings of the plot are moments of great joy, through which Richard remembers again what it is to be human. This is a book of hope and optimism, in spite of the sardonic tone Homes adopts towards the LA landscape and its jaded inhabitants.

Honestly, if May We Be Forgiven had not mirrored the plot of this book so exactly - its protagonist is a man who is jolted out of his lackluster life by tragedy, which has the effect of rejuvenating him as he is forced to interact with strangers, cope with bizarre encounters and form a new relationship with his brother's children - I probably would have found it breathtakingly original. It's just that Homes did it better the second time around (as one would hope), and that's the book I happened to read first. 

Overall assessment: 3.8 out of 5 stars. My bookclub has introduced me to the use of the full spectrum of decimal points in ratings, and I like the subtlety it allows me in rating a book. 

Memorable moments: Anhil, the owner of the doughnut shop Richard ends up in on the night he "wakes up", is perfectly positioned as the outsider in America, a Hindu immigrant whose vision of the USA comes largely from movies and misunderstandings. Much of the insight and humour in the novel stems from Anhil's left-of-centre comments.

"Americans try on the spiritual life of others like they don't have any of their own."

"Explain, why does everyone in American pretend to be blind? They practice not seeing. They get into the car and they call someone on the cell phone. They are afraid to be alone but they don't see the people around them."

What I read in 2014

The year 2014 was an amazing literary year for me, though unfortunately much of it went unrecorded on this blog. What with working full-time again, and the kids, and getting used to a new country, AND the hard drive on my home computer conking out for the fourth time since I bought it, I haven't had much time or energy left over to devote to writing and reviews. Which is really too bad, because there has been a lot to write about. This year I met my biggest (living) literary heros. Really - that is no exaggeration. I met Paul Auster and SALMAN RUSHDIE and Ian McEwan. I heard them read and discuss a variety of bookish topics, but I also shook their hands talked to them in person. It still blows my mind that this actually happened. I also funneled all the free time I DID have into reading, so that, shockingly, I managed to read 50 books this year. With a three year old and an 18 month old running wild in the house and Bibliohubby to look after (just kidding, he looks after me, really truly), with meals to cook and life to live, I feel rather proud of myself for fitting enough reading into the cracks that I accomplished this goal.

Turning back to this blog now I suddenly feel inspired again. There will be more posts soon, I promise, reviewing various books and events retrospectively and looking forward to what we can expect from 2015, from a literary perspective. But for now, here is a list, in no particular order, of the books I read in 2014.

1. Eve in Hollywood - Amor Towles
2. Life After Life - Kate Atkinson
3. The Invention of Wings - Sue Monk Kidd
4. 11/22/63 - Stephen King
5. Beautiful Ruins - Jess Walter
6. The Reason I Jump - Naoki Higashida & David Mitchell
7. The Alchemist (re-read) - Paulo Coelho
8. Freakonomics - Stephen D Levitt & Stephen J Dubner
9. Orphan Train - Christina Baker Klein
10. Tempting Fate - Jane Green
11. Timbuktu - Paul Auster
12. The Circle - Dave Eggers
13. Barracuda - Christos Tsolkias
14. The Blazing World - Siri Hustvedt
15. The Children Act - Ian McEwan
16. The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
17. The Woman Upstairs - Claire Messud
18. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves - Karen Joy Fowler
19. I am America and So Can You! - Stephen Colbert
20. The Storied Life of A. J. Ficry - Gabrielle Zevin
21. The Cement Garden - Ian McEwan
22. The Family Man - Elinor Lipman
23. The Cuckoo's Calling - Robert Galbraith
24. Me Before You - JoJo Moyes
25. The Massey Murder (DNF) - Charlotte Gray
26. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry - Rachel Joyce
27. The Invisible Man - H. G. Wells
28. We'll Always Have Paris - Jennifer Coburn
29. The One & Only - Emily Giffin
30. To Rise Again at a Decent Hour - Joshua Ferris
31. I am Having so Much Fun Here Without You - Courtney Maum
32. Summer House with Swimming Pool - Herman Koch
33. We Were Liars - E. Lockhart
34. Damage - Josephine Hart
35. This is Where I Leave You - Jonathan Tropper
36. Scrum: A Breathtakingly Brief & Agile Introduction - Chris Sims
37. The Awakening - Kate Chopin
38. The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
39. Not That Kind of Girl - Lena Dunham
40. The Rosie Effect - Graeme Simsion
41. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
42. Instructions for a Heatwave - Maggie O'Farrell
43. The End of the Affair - Graham Greene
44. Half of a Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
45. Yes Please - Amy Poehler
46. Eleonor & Park - Rainbow Rowell
47. The Strange Library - Haruki Murakami
48. Landline - Rainbow Rowell
49. Fangirl - Rainbow Rowell
50. The Book of Joe - Jonathan Tropper

It's an interesting list. Eight of these titles are non-fiction, though three of those are memoirs (of sorts) by comedians. I feel like this is almost its own genre these days. More than half of the books on this list were written by women - 28, to be precise. I am pleased about this, but it's only half the battle, of course. Harking back to a post I wrote in March 2013, reviewing those books publicly is the other half, a challenge I would like to take up in 2015. Five of the above-listed books are what I would consider to be classics - though clearly that is a complicated term, one which I may well discuss in greater depth in another post. Here I use it to mean a book that continues to be relevant and highly regarded many years (more than 50?) after its publication. Three of the books I read this year, for example, we published prior to the year 1900.

And finally, referring back to a post discussing global literature, I read books this year from nine different countries - the USA, the UK, Australia, Japan, Ireland, Nigeria, France and The Netherlands. That's not bad!

More to follow soon, I promise.

Bibliofilly x

Ian McEwan - The Children Act

If I had to compare Ian McEwan’s new book to his other work (and we all do this, don’t we, once we’ve read a few books by the same writer, whether or not it’s fair), I would say it’s a little On Chesil Beach and a little Enduring Love. I have always particularly enjoyed those books of McEwan’s in which story hangs together with a philosophical tension of some sort. This is certainly the case in The Children Act, in which McEwan explores the tension between religion and modern medical science, whilst simultaneously composing a story about family, the law, and marital love.

Fiona Maye is a High Court judge in London, in the Family Law Division. Perhaps as a consequence of her job, she is aloof and can come across – even to her husband – as cold and removed. The novel opens on Fiona at home, left in shock after her husband Jack informs her that he wishes to have an affair. He is entitled to this, Jack says, after seven weeks and one day with no sex, and after a long and committed monogamous relationship with Fiona. He even has someone lined up - a 28 year-old Fiona has met. He does not wish to change their marital status, he simply wants a holiday from it. Fiona watches from the window as he leaves their house with a suitcase. She is in her 50s, childless partly by choice, partly because her focus on career took priority until it was too late for children. The state of her childlessness, in the mire of marital upset that threatens to leave her forever alone, is a central concern of Fiona’s during the weeks that follow.

The drama at home is, of course, mirrored by drama at work. A new, urgent case comes before Fiona, of a 17 year old boy suffering from leukemia, one month shy of reaching the age of majority, whose parents are refusing a life-saving blood transfusion to him that would save his life. Their refusal is on religious grounds, and Fiona must decide whether the rationale of modern medicine trumps their staunch faith in circumstances where that faith would almost certainly lead to the death of their son. Complicating her decision is the son himself, an intelligent, charming soul who shares his parents’ faith but can’t help reveal to Fiona the potential living inside of him for a fulfilled future life. He is poetic and unusually innocent and Fiona finds herself drawn to him in a way she might not be were her personal circumstances not currently in chaos.

McEwan brilliantly weaves a story about the inconsistency of emotion and law in a division of the court where these two must by necessity coexist. He illustrates the difficulty for judges of making decisions that are right according to the law and, as far as possible, morally right for the people concerned. It left me wondering how on earth anyone in that position could possibly live a normal emotional life outside of court – because in order to do what they must at work, these judges have to shut off standard emotional responses to heart-breaking problems, and live with the very real, sometimes dramatic, consequences of their decisions.

Simultaneously moving and fascinating, this is a book I found hard to put down – not least because, as a lawyer myself, I appreciated the details of the legal cases that Fiona deals with throughout the book (reference to many cases is made, although just one stands at the core of the story). And as with many McEwan novels, music too plays an important role, so that one feels that the text and the marital relationship within it ebb and flow to the strains of classical music.

McEwan is back in top form here. I very much recommend this one to his fans, as well as to those of you who are new to his work.

Overall assessment: 4 out of 5 stars. I'm not sure why I hesitate to award it a higher rating. I enjoyed this immensely, but it somehow hasn't resonated for me as deeply as Amsterdam, for example. For me, a 5 star rating is really reserved for those books that stay with me long after I put them down, books that I would consider "favourites", to be read again and again. Getting caught up in McEwan's sparse language and razor-sharp observations, however, was, as always, a real joy.

Reading the World

I came across a fascinating article recently, about a woman who decided to spend a year reading one book from each country in the world. It’s such a wonderful idea. I love to travel, and informed my husband early on in our marriage that, even with our two young children in tow, I would like us to commit to visiting one new country each year. Why on earth I hadn’t thought of doing something similar with literature is beyond me!

Ann Morgan’s challenge was to read a book from every one of the 195 UN-recognised states (as well as former UN member Taiwan) in one year. By her calculations this meant reading one book every 1.85 days – a tall order indeed, especially as much of her non-reading time was spent trying to track down books (in English) from some of the smaller states. She succeeded though, in attaining her goal, and has since written a book about it, due out in February 2015.

Morgan’s list of books can be found here. The list includes not just the books she actually read, but some of those recommended by international readers of her blog. Out of curiosity, I printed the list and combed through it to determine how many countries I had covered in my own reading experience.

Before I divulge my own results, I need to confess that I have two significant counts in my favour.

First, I went to an international school where the upper level IB English class in our final year was called “World Literature”. We read well and widely, and I didn’t realise just how unusual this was until I went on to study English at a Canadian university and found myself subject to a curriculum made up almost entirely of books from the British end of the Western Canon (and, later, American and Canadian literary giants).

Second, I subsequently undertook postgraduate study in the field of English, and my specialty was postcolonial literature – the closest I could get to world literature without leaving the English department. As a result, my bookshelves became filled with Indian, African and Carribbean texts. I enthusiastically collected the excellent Heinemann African and Carribbean Writers series.

Even so, on examining Morgan’s list and adding to it writers with whom I am personally familiar, my current count is 43. I have read books from 43 countries. Interestingly, using this list of countries as the definitive standard, I have traveled to 42 of them – but the two lists do not line up. My reading travels include far more African and Carribbean nations than I have actually visited, whereas Asia is better represented in my physical travels.

I find the notion of “bookpacking” around the world intriguing, and Morgan has inspired me. Looking at the books I have read this year, only six countries are represented. It’s likely this will grow to seven by the end of the year, if I get to the first book of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s epic My Struggle as planned. But now, as well as traveling to a new country each year, I am determined that I will also read from at least one new country each year. A new way of expanding my horizons – thanks, Ann Morgan!

Claire Messud - The Woman Upstairs

I have wanted to read this book ever since Claire Messud attended the Sydney Writers' Festival last year and impressed attendees with her obvious intelligence. I must admit, though, that I had very little idea what it was about until I actually picked it up to read. I did not know, for example, that the "woman upstairs" of the title refers to middle-aged women who have failed to partner up and surround themselves with children, in the way that society expects them to, and who therefore feel relegated to the "attic" of the world (they are not madwomen, Messud's protagonist is at pains to point out, with clear reference to Bertha Mason; but expectations hang heavy upon them for how they are meant to live, quietly, without causing trouble for anyone else).

Please note that this notion of modern late-30s female singledom as a "failure" is Messud's (or rather, her protagonist's), and not mine. So we get immediately to the crux of my issue with this book: the attitude of its protagonist towards age and ageing.

First, though, I must stress how much I really enjoyed most of the novel. Messud is an absorbing writer, and Nora Eldridge is superbly drawn in her self-absorbed, intense rage against the world. Her fury courses through the book, instilling each page with shimmering vibrancy. I understand this fire is missing from Messud's other books, and the extreme emotion here certainly makes for compelling reading.

Nora is a third grade teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is highly regarded and well-liked. She has few close friends, but those she does have are good friends indeed. She looks after her widowed father and her spinsterly aunt, the woman she fears she is becoming.

However well she hides it, though, Nora is angry, seethingly so. She is 42 at the time of writing and 37 when the events she describes unfolded, and during this, her "middle-age", she feels her life is over. She is furious with the way she believes she is regarded by society, and by what she sees as being her lot in life. She wanted so much more. "It was supposed to say 'Great Artist' on my tombstone, but if I died right now it would say 'such a good teacher/daughter/friend instead.".

Nora was born to a mother whose great dilemma had been "to glimpse freedom too late, at too high a price." By the time her mother saw that a career and independence were possible, she was tied down to a domestic life with children. And this, she cautioned, is what Nora must avoid at all costs. Which she has, so much so that Nora now has the opposite problem. She has never married, and has no children. She lives in a world that is increasingly about appearances, where she and other women her age are considered to be "invisible". She still makes her art, tiny replicas of other women's rooms, a series she intends to call "A Room of One's Own?", the question mark being key. But her art, too, is small and private and, in not being seen, this side of her, the artist's side, is also invisible.

When Nora meets the Shahids, a family from France whose worldliness and beauty and interest seem to rub off on her, she feels that something is finally happening. The world turns, once again. All of a sudden, where before there had been no possibilities, now anything is possible. Nora falls in love, with Sirena, the glamorous Parisian artist, with Skandar, her handsome Lebanese-Palestinian professor husband, and with Reza, their sweet, long-lashed dark-haired son. It is an obsessive love, a love that is troubling to read. We can see, even as Nora feels she is awakening in their midst, that she means so much less to them than they to her. But where this will take Nora is unknown until the powerful ending of this book.

I was absorbed in Nora's interior rant, in her obsessions. But I was torn because, whilst I understand that one's late 30s / early 40s can be a difficult time for a woman - that transition from desirable youth to something less obviously glamourous and yet unknown - I also feel (like many other reviewers), that Nora's self-perception is largely self-pitying rubbish. Another way, for example, of expressing the notion of "middle-aged" is "in one's prime". The middle of one's life is also likely to be the most productive time of one's life. No longer so caught up in finding oneself, one can hopefully start to enjoy life more deeply.

I think it is true that society is geared, in many ways, towards admiration of youth in women, rather than age. And I know that it is difficult to be childless, not by choice, but by circumstance, at a time when most women one's own age are subsumed in the time consuming endeavours of raising a family. I myself met my husband late and started having children in my mid-30s. But because I was single in my early 30s I also know for a fact that Nora, especially in Cambridge, Massachusetts (she is not living in rural Idaho, for heaven's sakes), could be living a seriously exciting life at 37. She could be saving up her teacher's salary to travel during her long vacations. She could be studying. She could surround herself with other single 30-somethings, she could be dating and eating out at fabulous restaurants and going to art galleries and meeting new people and filling her life with the stuff that us "smug marrieds" only have time to dream about.

Anyway. The frustration is misplaced because we are dealing, here, with a character who has persuaded herself that she will live in a shoebox for the rest of her life. Until this family come along, who interrupt that certainty. And then, when they leave, which we, as readers, know all along they are going to do (this is really not a spoiler) they destroy her. Because it becomes abundantly clear that she only ever meant very little to them. She was a placeholder in Sirena's life, but for Nora, Sirena had become the centre of her life.

Messud tells a dark psychological tale and I was left horrified, hoping that Nora's rage would indeed fuel her into some sort of extreme life-affirming action.

Overall assessment: 4 out of 5.

Pros: Terrific language, Messud fully engages the reader with this dark and disturbing tale which is, at times, un-put-downable. As well as a story about the energy and power of anger and obsession, this is a novel of ideas - there are fascinating discussions about what it means to be an artist, what defines art, about history and who writes it and about ethics and morality.

Cons: It is unsettling to get inside the head of someone whose views are so frustratingly self-destructive. And Nora's continous description of women of a certain age as "spinsterly" is unnerving for those of us reading who are in her age group! I mean - "death is knocking"? For heaven's sakes!! I hope I have another 40 years left in me! Life ain't over yet, sweetheart!

Select quotes:

"Sirena was turning, before my eyes, into my ideal of an artist - as if I'd imagined her and, by imagining her, had conjured her into being. And here's the weird thing: her existence as an ideal woman artist didn't feel as though it thwarted or controlled me, I didn't look at her and think, 'Why are you almost famous and I'm only your helper?' I don't recall having the thought even once. Instead, I looked at her and saw myself, saw what suddenly seemed possible for me, too, because it was possible for her."

"But to be furious, murderously furious, is to be alive."

Herman Koch - Summer House with Swimming Pool

 

I was keen to read Koch's new book because I really enjoyed The Dinner, which is a highly original, thought-provoking and ultimatey disturbing read. It shouldn't surprise me that Summer House with Swimming Pool is also disturbing. Or that, as with The Dinner, we don't find out what the crime is that lies at the heart of the novel until three quarters of the way through. But what did surprise me was just how hateful most of the characters are.

Koch is a good writer, but after reading this, his latest, book, I feel that he may not be a very nice person. His protagonist here, the good doctor Marc Schlosser, is really rather detestable. He has a distaste for the human body and the wellbeing of his patients is more or less irrelevant to him. He has built up a stable of patients well-known in the creative arts by turning a blind eye to their foibles (too much alcohol? Pfft, he says, many people drink too much and live long ), and by liberally doling out prescription drugs.

It is through his work that Marc meets Ralph Meier, an ego-driven actor who looks at women in a way that disgusts even Marc. Through a series of social occasions, Ralph's family and Marc's become friendly and end up, eventually, holidaying together. Here, at a summer house with a swimming pool, events unfold that cause Marc to behave in a manner contradictory to the hippocratic oath he has taken, and which land him in the quandary he is in when we meet him at the beginning of the novel: on the verge of possibly losing his medical licence, not through some mistake, but through a conscious and deathly serious infraction, the consequences of which he was well aware.

The story unfolds persuasively, but the book is too long, and the characters too distasteful. The nuances that made The Dinner a hit are largely absent here, though the final twist (it is no spoiler to say there is one) packs a punch.

The only redeeming feature of Koch's protagonist is his love for his daughters, and the way he speaks of drawing closer to his wife in a crisis. But even these characteristics are insufficient to keep one's skin from crawling after placing the book down.

Koch is clever, there's no doubt about that, but this book has persuaded me that there is no need for me to read the rest of his oeuvre.

Overall assessment: 3 out of 5. A good read if you can stomache it. And note that it took me a good quarter of the novel before I was drawn in to the story.