Cocktails

One of the great extras with Graeme Simsion's The Rosie Project is the list of cocktails in the back based on characters in the novel (all served with a twist!)

The one below is more conventional, but a little different to Don's version, which came out of The Bartender's Companion: -

"Dr. Miranda Ball raised her hand."Same again, please."
I called to Rosie, loudly, as the bar area was now very noisy. "Miranda Ball. Alabama Slammer. One part each sloe gin, whisky, Galliano, triple sec, orange juice, orange slice and a cherry."
"We're out of triple sec," yelled Rosie.
"Substitute Cointreau. Reduce the quantity by twenty per cent."

By the end of the evening at the golf club, Don, Rosie and the boss of the operation had made and served one hundred and forty-three cocktails!

The Rosie Project

Bill Gates was right about this book. He read it overnight, and I took just over a day to complete it, in stark contrast to my previous struggle with the magic realism of Mr. Fox. It is a fabulous read that is hard to put down, with a thoroughly engaging protagonist.

Everyone is going to love Graeme Simsion's Don Tillman,  a Professor of Genetics, pushing forty, who has everything scheduled and spreadsheeted in his life, but who is still in want of a wife. Don knows he is different, (his behaviour is typical of someone with Asperger's Syndrome), and that it is always going to be difficult for someone like him to find a life-partner, so he decides to initiate "The Wife Project". He devises a questionnaire to sift out time-wasters, and find his ideal woman, helped by his closest friend and colleague Gene, and Gene's long-suffering wife Claudia.

Things take a comic turn when Rosie fills in his questionnaire, and eliminates herself immediately from the running by virtue of being both a smoker AND a vegetarian. This is when the real fun begins! Although Don knows that Rosie doesn't fit the bill, nevertheless he just can't stop seeing her, ostensibly to help her in the search for her real father.

There are several laugh-out-loud moments in this novel, and some simply brilliant one-liners from Don, who is unable to pick up on the social cues that most of us process straightforwardly. Although he may be socially inept and gaffe-prone, being ASD has given him amazing gifts of organisation, focus and memory, which he is able to use to his advantage. His star turn as a cocktail waiter was one of the most hilarious episodes in the book. As he expertly took orders and served up Alabama Slammers, Rob Roys and Martinis, (whilst surreptiously swabbing empties for DNA), I wanted to punch the air and celebrate the triumph of a nerdy Geneticist over the smug, successful, professional customers he was serving.

Love is, of course, not an exact science, with precise ingredients like a cocktail, and the joy of this novel is watching Don's rigid schedule bend to accommodate another person, without him really realising why. He deserves to find love, but can a man who can recognise a DNA match, find the love of his life through a questionnaire, or will life be a little more inventive and romantic?

Summer reads

How many of those Summer novels that we look forward to reading on the beach, do we actually read all the way through to the end? Somebody with too much time on their hands has researched this very question and discovered that not many of us persevere to the last page.


http://www.channel4.com/news/books-summer-reads-how-much-actually-hawking-index


Let's hope my Summer is not full of "non-reads!"

Mr. Fox

So, I'm back to Magic Realism, it would appear, with Helen Oyeyemi's Mr. Fox.

"It's ridiculous to be so sensitive about the content of fiction. It's not real. I mean, come on. It's all just a lot of games." says the fictional author, St. John Fox to his fictional heroine, Mary Foxe. She takes umbrage at her creator's villainy in constantly doing away with his female leads, and accuses him of being a serial killer.

Unfortunately, I AM sensitive about the content of fiction, and so while I know it's a lot of games, and am aware that Oyeyemi is playing them, (in what one reviewer has described as an almost "trippy" way), I just prefer my fiction to be more straightforward story-telling.

I do not deny that she is a very talented author, able to create tension and suspense, and to handle her protagonists with wit and humour, but I was left dissatisfied and bewildered by this novel.

I'm going back to meat and two veg, I think, and leaving the literary Sushi alone!

The Rosie Project

At the end of the academic year in the school where I work, it has become the custom to exchange Summer reads with colleagues. I was lucky enough to be given The Rosie Project which Bill Gates enthused about on Twitter recently:

"The Rosie Project: A Novel, by Graeme Simsion. Melinda picked up this novel earlier this year, and she loved it so much that she kept stopping to read passages to me. I started it myself at 11 p.m. one Saturday and stayed up with it until 3 the next morning. Anyone who occasionally gets overly logical will identify with the hero, a genetics professor with Asperger’s Syndrome who goes looking for a wife. (Melinda thought I would appreciate the parts where he’s a little too obsessed with optimizing his schedule. She was right.) It’s a funny and profound book about being comfortable with who you are and what you’re good at. I’m sending copies to several friends and hope to re-read it later this year. It is one of the most enjoyable novels I’ve read in a long time."

With such a glowing testimonial, I think I need to lay aside all my other books, find a shady hammock and read it! 

Of course this just means that I'm in the same position as those Commonwealth Games cyclists who dropped a lap in the Scratch race, in that I will never be able to get back on track with clearing my backlog of unread novels!  

Baileys Women's Fiction Shortlist

After writing about Caitlin Moran's thoughts on being a judge for the Baileys Women's Fiction Prize 2014, I thought I should include the short-listed novels.

The winner, announced on June 4th was Eimear McBride for "A Girl is a Half-formed Thing." She had previously spent a decade trying to get her debut novel published. Bet those who rejected her are kicking themselves now!

So far, I've only read one of these: Burial Rites, by Hannah Kent, which was a brilliant debut novel.

SHORTLIST 2014

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Americanah

Hannah Kent - Burial Rites

Jhumpa Lahiri - The Lowland

Audrey Magee - The Undertaking

Eimear McBride - A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing

Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch

2014 Shortlist

    

    

59 books in 5 months!

I just had to share the very fine musings of the excellent Caitlin Moran, writing in the Times Magazine the other week about the process of reading.

She was rather exercised by having agreed to become a judge on the Baileys Prize, realising that this would entail reading 59 books in 5 months, whilst still holding onto the day job (Columnist of the Year at The Times), AND being a wife and mother. After three months, she felt physically sick with literature, having gorged herself on this smorgasbord of novels. She was reminded of what she always knew as a young reader, and I shall quote it in full, because its just such a brilliant description of what reading is:

"Because what judging a literary prize did was remind me of what I knew when I was 11, and was wiser, and forgot as I got older and stupider: that reading is not a passive act. That it's amusing that "bookworms" are thought of as weak, bespectacled and pale - withdrawn from the world, easy to beat in a fight.

For a reader is not a simple consumer - as you are listening to a record or watching a movie.  A reader is something far more noble, dangerous and exhilarating - a co-artist.

Your mind is the projection screen every writer steals; it is the firing of your neurones that makes every book come alive. You are the electricity that turns it on. A book cannot live until the touch of your hand on the first page brings it alive.  A writer is essentially typing blank pages - shouting out spells in the dark - until the words are read by you, and the magic explodes into your head, and no one else's.

Consider me, now. If I type "dragon" - casually, just six letters, no effort for me - suddenly, a dragon appears in your mind. You have to make it. Your brain fires up - perhaps your heartbeat will speed a little, depending on if you have had previous unhappy experiences with dragons.  Perhaps you will have given her golden claws - or maybe you have a fondness for tight, black shiny scales instead. But however closely I have described her, she will still be your dragon - in your head, a result of your million tiny acts of birth.  And no one else will ever see her.

And so to read is, in truth, to be in the constant act of creation. That old lady on the bus with her Orwell; the businessman on the Tube with Patricia Cornwell; the teenager roaring through Capote - they are not engaged in idle pleasure. Their heads are on fire.  Their hearts are flooding.  With a book, you are the landscape, the sets, the snow, the hero, the kiss - you are the mathematical calculations that plot the trajectory of the blazing, crashing Zeppelin. You - pale, punchable reader - are terraforming whole worlds in your head. These books are as much a part of you as your guts and your bone. And when your guts fail and your bones break, Narnia or Jamaica Inn or Gormenghast will still be there; as pin-sharp and bright as the day you first imagined them - hiding under the bedclothes, sitting on the bus. Exhausted, on a rainy day, weeping over the death of someone you never met, and who was nothing more than words until transfused with your time and your love, and the imagination you constantly dismiss as " just being a bit of a bookworm."

So this is what I remembered, as I judged a literary prize, this Summer. Being a reader.  The unseen, life-changing duet you sing with anyone who's ever written a book."

See, I told you it was good!