Category: books

La Belle Sauvage (2017) by Philip Pullman

Did you see the 2007 film Golden Compass with Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman?

The movie tanked considering the US$180 million cost.

But the books are great. It was based on Pullman’s His Dark Materials series:

La Belle Sauvage is a fantasy novel by Philip Pullman published 2017, the first volume in a planned trilogy named The Book of Dust. Set around 12 years before the start of His Dark Materials …

Reviews have been great for the start of the prequel.

I’d agree. It’s well worth reading.

My only criticism is the same one I have with all fantasy: deus ex machina. The plot twists are unexpected appearances of magical things unrestrained by any logic or rules.

It always seems a bit cheap, to me.

 

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visiting friends in Switzerland

4 Calgarians got together in Switzerland.

Meet-ups like this on the road are always fun.

Tam had come to Europe with her daughter who’s doing a semester in Spain.

Cal and Maria are starting their 3rd year living in small villages near Bern.

The first two years they lived in Solothurn, a lovely place popular with Swiss but almost unknown by foreign tourists. Population is about 17,000 with 20% of those being resident foreign nationals.

St. Ursus Cathedra, Solothurn.

We enjoyed a terrific meal in Solothurn. It  was Tam’s farewell. She flew home to Seattle same day.

I stayed the night with Cal and Maria, learning much about Switzerland. It’s a unique place which many other nations should study.

Cal showed me a fantastic book called Living and Working in Switzerland: A Survival Handbook by David Hampshire. It’s hilarious, must reading for anyone moving there to work.

https://www.amazon.com/Living-Working-Switzerland-Survival-Handbook/dp/1909282634

Murial Spark – Loitering with Intent

Muriel Spark’s Loitering with Intent (1981) was published when she was 64.

The novel is written in the first person, framed as a memoir, as Fleur Talbot, the celebrated writer, looks back, “in the fullness of [her] years”, to the weeks and months of winter 1949-50, when she was working on her first novel, living in a bedsit, supporting herself by working in secretarial jobs.

Guardian review

It is an excellent book. With an excellent plot.

If you are a fan of literature over fiction, I recommend it. The themes are still important in 2018.

It was made into a film in 2014. It’s 33% on Rotten Tomatoes.

The Snowman by Jo Nesbø

The Snowman (Norwegian: Snømannen, 2007) is a novel by Norwegian crime-writer Jo Nesbø. It is the seventh entry in his Harry Hole series. …

Looking through cold cases, Hole realises that he is tracking Norway’s first known serial killer. …

I’d heard great things about Nesbø. He is an excellent author.

The book is complex and very suspenseful. I appreciated all the main characters.

One criticism. I’d say the book is about 30% too long. 30% too complicated. It would have been stronger if more succinct.

The Snowman (2017 film) should have been excellent. But critics panned it. I can’t imagine how they bungled adapting this fascinating story.

It’s 8% on Rotten Tomatoes.

The Storyteller of Marrakesh: A Novel

Hassan, the “storyteller” of Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya’s … novel, is more than just a narrator: he is a guide, a witness, a showman, a chronicler of Moroccan legend and lore.

His stage is the central square of Marrakesh, Djemaa el Fna, where the myriad wonders of this great, red-walled city surround and inspire him. …

On this particular night, however, Hassan is concerned with only one mystery: the story of a foreign couple, a beautiful French-American woman and her Indian partner, who vanished from the square one evening a few years earlier. …

NY Times Book Review

I read the book in Morocco, enjoying the hectic main square each evening.

This is an ambitious book. A modern “Thousand and One Nights”. But I can’t say the mystical style worked for me. It has mixed reviews on GoodReads.

The author is from India. But he did a good job of giving the rest of us foreigners a bit of the flavour of the nation.

Here is one of the last real storytellers. I didn’t see any in the square itself. It’s too noisy in 2018.

Abderrahim El Makkouri