Every now and then, I like to read something completely different. And it doesn't get much more "different" than Man-Eaters of Kumaon, the personal account of Colonel Jim Corbett about his exploits in tracking the tigers and leopards posing a threat to the citizens of Northern India in the 1920s and 30s. Born and raised in the area, Corbett spent his childhood learning the ways of the jungle, and it was from this background that he came to be seen as the only man to be called on to help the local population, of whom an estimated 1200 were killed by various animals at the time.
I found Man-Eaters of Kumaon, and I am sure that this is as a result of its having been written in 1944, to be a book of bizarre contrasts. Corbett clearly possessed a talent for descriptive writing, and combined with his exceptional knowledge of the area's flora and fauna, creates a wonderfully vivid image of the jungles and valleys in which he stalks the tigers. He was also clearly a great lover of nature and is keen to stress that man should make great efforts to limit his impact upon it. All of which goes out of the window somewhat as he goes around shooting tigers, deer, birds and landing hundreds of fish. While his reasons for it were fair enough - to protect the lives of others, and for food - it did seem something of a contradiction to me. Likewise, in his interactions with the local population, Corbett describes their cultures and customs in a way that only someone who had put in the time and effort to understand and appreciate them could - but is more than happy to be waited on hand and foot whenever he reaches a village, and of course is clear on the point that the locals are incapable of sorting out their own problems with these animals. On balance though, Corbett takes care to describe the reasons that these tigers became dangerous to humans - always some form of injury or illness that rendered them unable to hunt their usual prey - and the fact he shows any respect to local culture at all is admirable given the historical context.
Otherwise, the book was an enjoyable enough read, despite some archaic language use and a liberal sprinkling of (what I assume to be) Pubjabi or Hindi loan words with little explanation. Corbett makes the hunts as much about the build up as the actual kills themselves, leading to some heart-stopping moments as he suddenly finds himself face to face with a man-eating tiger after days of tracking, or almost running out of time to find his quarry after six weeks in the wild and the prospect of letting down the locals weighing over him. He takes care to explain his tracking techniques, based on a staggering knowledge of the network of interactions between animal life in the region, and switches up narrative styles by including first-hand anecdotes by villagers who had survived encounters with the animals and official reports from the time. There are even some moments of (perhaps unintentional) humour, as Corbett drops in incidental details probably deserving of chapters in their own right. "That house was definitely haunted, but this isn't a book of ghost stories", and "at that point we were almost killed by a leopard but I'm talking about a tiger at the moment" were two highlights from this point of view.
Ultimately, Man-Eaters of Kumaon is an interesting throwback to a time when man and nature were still not quite on equal terms, a time when the British Empire was still very much in force in India, and an account from a man whose own story is often more interesting than those he is telling.
4/5
There was a whole range of songs I could have gone with here, but with apologies to Nelly Furtado I had to go with the one that reflected Corbett's prose style best. So many tigers...
It's fair to say that I've shown more of an interest in language than most over the course of my life. I wouldn't have ended up with an MA in translation and gone on to work in the field otherwise - and I wouldn't be looking to add more and more languages to my collection if that interest wasn't ongoing. Linguistics, however, is an area of language I haven't touched on much, despite being one that I find very interesting. As it turned out, David Crystal's A Little Book of Language, a crash course on the huge range of topics that fall under that umbrella, was a very good entry point.
Crystal is one of the world's foremost experts on linguistics, but this particular book dials back the academic side of things, being presented for children. This meant that the style was simple, the content laid out in a straightforward manner, and everything backed up with plenty of practical examples. And as good as my technical knowledge of language - or rather languages - may be, I appreciated it for all of these things. As Crystal says, the study of language is perhaps the biggest field of study of all, and I'm sure I would have felt lost at least in some places had things not been spelled out so clearly.
That being said, there were moments where I wished that he had been a bit more direct. While the examples were useful, there were also a lot of them; at times too many for my liking for the sake of making what could be quite simple points. And the writing style as a whole came across at times like a grandfather rambling on to his grandchildren, whether they showed any interest or not.
Ultimately, though, there was a lot to enjoy here, and a lot to learn. For instance, how the majority of the world's languages have never been properly studied and mapped out, to the extent that we still have no idea how most languages outside of the Indo-European sphere relate to each other. Or that we probably never will, as one language is lost every couple of weeks. And how even languages that have been studied for centuries, like English, are far from being completely documented in terms of their every usage.
Best of all were the chapters on the very first stages of language - the ways in which parents adapt their speech patterns to pass language onto their children, who then go through a multitude of processes to form sound, combine sounds to form words, and then words to speak coherently. It seems like an impossible task when broken down that way, and I was left amazed that we ever managed to talk at all.
4/5
So I can only imagine the amount of brainpower that would go into something like this:
Joseph Heller's Catch-22 has been my favourite book since I first read it at the age of 17, and I have yet to come across anything since that matches it in terms of its combination of genuinely epic scope combined with microscopic attention to detail, and passage after passage that resonate even after multiple readings and a million times removed from the situation in which Heller found his inspiration.
So how can you create a sequel to perfection? Well, Heller tried, although it took him over 30 years, and the result, like a lot of sequels, is a long way short of what came before. Not to say that Closing Time is a bad book; far from it.
Set in 1994, it catches up with three of the more interesting characters from Catch-22 to survive World War II - protagonist Yossarian, who has made his fortune, started a family and is now faced for the second time with a genuine prospect of death; Milo Minderbinder, who, having expanded his trade empire into a global, multi-billion dollar conglomerate, is now trying to sell planes to the government; and the squadron chaplain, pursued by the FBI for his ability to produce tritium organically. Heller fills in the events in their lives since the war ended - and since the fate of all three was ambiguous at the end of Catch-22, it was actually quite nice to hear that things had been going relatively well. While it was slightly disappointing that Yossarian's solution to the titular catch had failed, it was necessary for the purposes of this book that he was still caught in it, and all three are provided with a certain amount of closure as to their problems in the first book.
That only accounts for half of the plot, however, the rest being given over to Sammy Singer, who appears in Catch-22 although I believe not by name, and his childhood friend Lew Rabinowitz, who served in the war as an infantryman. These parts I found harder to get through; their tales of working-class Jewish life in Coney Island almost impossible to identify with and the fact that Heller writes them in a much more conventional prose style to be very jarring with the rest of the book. There were some moments of poignancy but these were few and far between, and I had to wonder why Heller had decided to include this plot line at all.
But there was much to like elsewhere; more than enough, in fact, that I could enjoy the book as a whole. Heller's dialogue positively fizzes back and forth between characters, there are some genuinely laugh-out-loud lines, and he finds room to slip in quite a few catch-22 scenarios for the present day. None of this is anything like on the level of Catch-22 itself, but he had an impossible act to follow in that respect. And indeed the book stands on its own at times as well, as Heller slices through late 20th-century consumerist excess, the everlasting obtuseness of military bureaucracy (the scenes where Milo pitches his new stealth bomber to a bickering group of government advisers are by far the best in the novel), and the it-couldn't-happen-could-it ludicrousness of American politics, as the book's unnamed president inadvertently brings about nuclear Armageddon by mistake while playing a video game.
So all in all, it's not a bad follow up to the best book of all time - in lots of ways a spiritual successor, in other ways trying to do something a bit different and for the most part succeeding at both. It's almost as funny, almost as sad, and way more bizarre - and given the bar that had been set for it, that's no mean achievement.
4/5
This is a book about the end, and the book itself states that this is the soundtrack to it. I can kind of see it.
A week's holiday requires some easy reading - and it doesn't get much easier than Nick Spalding. Having read a couple of his books, I consider myself a fan, and so it wasn't too much of a challenge to get through two more in a matter of days.
Life... With No Breaks was Spalding's debut, and actually his most interesting concept - could he write a fully fleshed book in 24 hours? Well, yes and no. Firstly because it took (slightly) longer than that, and secondly because the result isn't your average book. It's more of a conversation with the reader, as Spalding takes considerable time to introduce himself and recap why he has set himself this challenge. From there, though, it is an interesting and enjoyable read as he slides between topics nicely, bemoaning various aspects of modern British life and veritably churning out one-liners in the process. And he's not afraid to go deeper, touching on death, his divorce, previous failures in the literary sphere and the inevitable passage of time. I also found it a good indication of the origin of his writing style, which I have found inflexible in the past - it turns out his characters all talk like he does. All in all it's an interesting idea well executed.
Mad Love is a much more conventional rom-com novel that follows a man from London and a woman from California as a dating website, as a publicity stunt, singles them out for marriage based on the compatibility of their profiles. The prospect of £30,000 and a rent-free year in a penthouse flat is enough to convince Adam, a video game reviewer, and Jessica, a student in nutrition, to go through with it. The wedding itself is dealt with quickly, and the plot soon settles into a routine of arguments as it turns out their profiles may not have been entirely honest. Mad Love lacks, for the most part, the ingredients that got me into Spalding's other work - the laugh-out-loud moments, well-constructed scenes and memorable characters. The ending was predictable, and the dialogue just didn't quite work at times. But the book as a whole was saved by a moment of breathtaking sadness that proved that, if Spalding ever decides to write something serious, he would probably do a very good job.
All in all, I pretty much knew what to expect going in and both books delivered - lighter than air, capable of raising a smile, and a much-needed break before going back into the heavy stuff.
Life... With No Breaks - 3.5/5
Mad Love - 3/5
Life... With No Breaks seems to have anticipated a trend that has recently emerged in music of writing fully-formed songs in as little time as possible. This is the best combination of time/result:
It wasn't until around the age of 12 that I realised I was quite good at sports. Until then I had been limited to a few modest appearances for my school's lower rugby teams, and had been improving rapidly at swimming since the age of about five. But that year, I found myself picking up any sport I tried in PE with relative ease - hockey, basketball, softball and more. Even in the traditional schoolboy pursuits of football and cricket, where my prior lack of talent had led me to believe I wasn't an athlete, I started to find myself performing well above average. Fast forward ten years and after varying levels of success in athletics, squash, rugby, American football and swimming and water polo - often training in several of these at any one time - I found myself dropping back down to simply water polo. It was just the sport where I found it easiest to stay competitive at a high level: I enjoyed and relished the training in a way I no longer did for anything else. And not that I was exactly world class, but I have always wondered where that sudden change came from; whether any sporting talent had lain dormant since birth, or if simply sticking at it for long enough meant that I improved where others who hadn't put in the practice didn't.
In The Sports Gene, American writer and former collegiate middle distance runner David Epstein discusses this dichotomy at length. He begins, appropriately, with examples of both sides of the argument. Specifically, Swedish high jumper Stefan Holm who, despite his relatively small stature, had the fortune to grow up near one of Europe's premier indoor track and field facilities. From childhood, he devoted hours to the high jump, and peaked with a gold at the Athens Olympics. However, in the 2007 World Championships he was defeated by Donald Thomas, a Bahamian who had taken up the event only a year earlier on a bet. So, Epstein states, it is possible to succeed in sport through both relentless practice and by being genetically gifted. But it is the extent to which these might be linked that forms the bulk of the book, and by far its most interesting passages.
Epstein delves into a wide range of sports and scientific ideas, from the ability of elite level athletes to identify a game situation after being shown an image faster than the human brain should be able to process, to the fact that it might actually be arm length rather than height that fuels basketball success, onto the work in identifying genetic variation in humans that might pinpoint the area of sport where an individual might excel.
In essence this is a compendium of sports biology, but Epstein saves it from reading like a journal entry by his ability to spin a yarn. He introduces a host of eccentric characters in the field, from the Greek geneticist obsessed with mapping the genomes of Jamaican sprinters, to the American who travels to Kenya each year to hold distance running trials for academically gifted teenagers who have never run a race in their life. All of the teenagers belong to a single ethnic group, the Kalenjin, and nearly all of those selected go on to full athletic scholarships at American colleges. There is also a truly heartwarming story of a recovering drug addict from Alaska who went on to become the greatest sled dog racer of all time by identifying huskies with an innate desire to keep running and breeding that trait into a whole team. Epstein ends with his own travels in Finland speaking to the family of one of the country's greatest ever cross country skiers - quite a few of whom possess a genetic mutation increasing their red blood cell count to superhuman levels. I can't pretend to have understood all of the science, but it is presented so clearly and accessibly that I found myself learning a lot about the basic concepts.
There were a few issues, however. In making his work entertaining, Epstein has a habit of diverging into unnecessarily flowery prose at times, which I found slightly irritating. The science behind all of this remains largely a new branch and he is careful to remind the reader that the studies he mentions have either not been repeated or deal with such a specific group that they can't be considered representative of humanity as a whole. As he says, it is possible through gene mapping to identify about a billion people in the world who have absolutely no chance of making the Olympic 100m final - but the people themselves could already have told you that. I also feel that he missed a fairly obvious conclusion in that when the traits of physical suitability and an obsession with training coincide in an individual, you get athletes that transcend their sport - the Cristiano Ronaldos, Serena Williamses and Lebron Jameses of the world.
Ultimately, though, I found it absolutely fascinating that we may one day be able to discover the genetic keys to elite athletic ability, and this book was the ideal introduction into a very complex field. I was happy enough to take away the fact that my swimming ability might just be down to my relatively short legs - the same length, in fact, as Michael Phelps'. Never mind that he is four inches taller and blessed with the desire to spend eight hours a day in a pool...
4/5
Really this was just an opportunity to learn obscure facts about sports I don't usually follow.
Brace yourself, this could get long. Almost certainly not as long, though, as David Foster Wallace's 1996 novel Infinite Jest. It's not often that the mere size of a book becomes a talking point in itself, but weighing in at well over 1000 pages and including over 200 pages of footnotes to the main text and further end notes to those footnotes, the work has become infamous for being physically difficult to read. Stories have circulated of readers tearing it apart to make it more manageable, and it is recommended that three bookmarks are employed to keep track of its hugely complicated structure. I consider myself very fortunate to live in an age where technology has made such issues obsolete, but even tackling the book in Kindle form was a serious challenge - flicking into the final chapter and being faced with over 14 hours of reading still to go was a sobering moment indeed.
In his (excellent) introduction, Wallace's contemporary Dave Eggers discusses the idea of whether students of literature (crucially rather than fans of reading in general, although I consider myself a member of both groups) should feel a duty to read Infinite Jest. His conclusion is that they should, if only to witness the limits to which the medium can be stretched, and as someone who has set aside the time to listen to the entirety of The Constructus Corporation's three-and-a-half hour electronic-sci-fi-rap masterpiece The Ziggurat and to watch the entirety of the three-and-a-half hour redux cut of Apocalypse Now, this was enough to sell it to me.
At the end of last year I decided that this would be the only book I had to read in full this year, and while I finished it long before the "deadline" I was glad I had given myself room to breathe. Wallace's prose is more often than not treacle-slow, and while the reading certainly got easier as it went on I found it a bit of a slog throughout. He is also fond of repetition, and while characters making what is essentially the same point in different ways for up to 20 pages at a time was surprisingly entertaining, I found it had an almost hypnotic effect on me on occasion - there being effectively no point to get to, and often no conclusion then being found as the narrative swerved off into a completely different plot thread. His syntax, too, can be absolutely brutal at times, with paragraph-long sentences often requiring three or more reads in order to work out what was actually happening. And though all of this may seem critical, the writing is redeemed by Wallace's spectacular range of vocabulary and expression. It reminded me at times of avant-garde rap lyrics, with alliteration, assonance and internal rhymes cropping up all over the place to keep the words oozing along. I consider Oscar Wilde to be just about the pinnacle of English-language usage, and while Infinite Jest is completely incomparable, it was the best-written book I have read in a very long time.
The plot, such as it is, revolves around a film. Specifically, one that is so absorbingly entertaining that anyone who watches it feels compelled to rewind and watch it again - and again and again until they expire from dehydration or starvation or the like. Meeting on a cliff in the American desert, a cross-dressing secret agent and a member of a wheelchair-bound Quebecois separatist movement discuss, in great depth, possible weaponisation of the film. At a tennis academy in Boston, the son of the producer of this film, since dead by his own hand, goes through the trials of becoming a world-class sportsman and of being a teenager in America. Next to that academy, the residents of a halfway house for recovering addicts of various kinds go through their recovery process. And as the novel goes on, these three main plots begin to intersect. The above is a massive oversimplification, of course - Wallace creates a world in this book to a depth I have never seen before and will likely never see again. Characters who, in shorter works, would have been inconsequential or not even mentioned at all - the tennis academy janitor or a shop owner murdered by the Quebecois separatists, for example - are given rich, detailed back stories and sometimes even chapters of their own, where it seems the narrative is going to follow them in the long term, only to be dropped and often never heard of again. The overlapping of the plots happens slowly, insidiously, often through singular allusions by characters or the narrative that might be easily missed - indeed, I'm sure I missed the majority, and a re-read will be essential to truly appreciate the patchwork of stories that grows and then shrinks in elliptical form as the book reaches its eventual end.
As for the main plots, I most enjoyed the scenes at the academy; I suppose as the easiest to relate to. Young Hal Incandenza, precocious, studious, and just really, really good at tennis, is arguably one of two characters in the book to receive a comprehensive profile from Wallace, and as such his journey is enjoyable to follow as he tries to juggle school work, an exhausting athletic schedule, a creeping drug dependency and the host of bizarre characters he calls friends and superiors at the academy, all overshadowed by the still-fresh memories of the death of his father. While some readers complain that the tennis match scenes are too in-depth, I actually found myself wishing that Wallace had taken more time to dwell on them. A former talent himself, he manages to hit upon the idiosyncrasies that make the game one of the hardest of all - the essential mental and physical control and discipline required simply not to crack while being exposed as an individual under the gaze of all in an arena where the margin for error is truly microscopic. He manages to draw out an almost zen-like quality to the sport, a counterpoint to an increasingly hyperactive society.
The other two main threads were still both enjoyable in their way, and likewise contained some real truths about the nature of life, society and the human condition. In particular the story of Don Gately, the other fully-formed character, formerly hopelessly addicted to alcohol and painkillers but now sober and working as a warden at the halfway house, I found genuinely inspiring in terms of how a combination of a good soul and a solid work ethic were able to help him overcome an abusive childhood and his subsequent, almost inevitable, spiral into addiction and reckless behaviour. Similarly some of the exchanges between the two men undercover suggested to me that Wallace really did have answers to some of humanity's biggest questions.
This is reflected, too, in the world in which he sets his book. The events take place some time around the mid-00s, i.e. the not-too-distant future at the time of writing, and some of his observations have been shown to be eerily accurate. The general connectedness of society, working-class America's opiate problem and the trend of the biggest companies buying out all conceivable rivals were arguably predictable for someone with their finger on the pulse in the 90s. While Donald Trump wasn't (officially) an independent candidate, his rise to power on the back of a wave of anti-establishment reactionary voting seems a lot like that of Johnny Gentle, famous crooner, who heads up the book's government of the new US-Canadian-Mexican supernation; but that had arguably been seen before with the likes of Reagan and Carter. Less easy to explain, however, are visions of on-demand video services threatening the livelihood of network television, and technology that essentially amounts to Skype and Snapchat. To repeat, this was written in 1996, and Wallace himself claimed to have never used the internet until after publication. But rather than saying he possessed psychic powers or some inside line into the future of technology, I think this is more down to his spectacular ability to dissect human nature - we have these things now not because they are possible, but because we wanted them. Certainly, I won't be surprised in future if we see the names of years being sold to the highest bidder, or America dealing with its waste problem by catapulting rubbish into a huge pit on the Canadian border (in one of the book's less subtle metaphors).
The entry so far may seem like gushing to a certain extent, but I would like to balance that by adding that Infinite Jest is not without some sizeable flaws. Do I think it would have benefited hugely from a more aggressive editing process? Absolutely. And, love or hate the book as a whole, I am sure that nearly everyone who has made it to the end will have felt hugely disappointed with the way it halts abruptly in the middle of all of its plotlines, leaving just about everything unresolved. In fact, the ending was enough to bump it down a spot to number three on my all-time list, but ultimately I can still say with confidence that this is one of the best books I have ever read. I feel a greater appreciation of literature, my vocabulary has been expanded and I'd even go as far as to say as my world view has been altered. The next one is definitely going to be a bit lighter, though.
5/5
And you have to laugh, because what other choice have you got?
I have long been a fan of David Wong's writing. At a time of my life when I was spending far too much time browsing through the articles on cracked.com, I found that, while his content generally wasn't as interesting as some of their other columnists, he was probably the most talented as a writer, with an agile turn of phrase that elevated him above the crowd and suggested he could go on to achieve more.
So it's not too surprising that he has fostered a successful career as a novelist. His debut, John Dies at the End, was a well-deserved break-out hit, a thoroughly enjoyable horror romp through small-town America with a number of unexpected twists and some imaginative world building along the way. Its sequel, This Book is Full of Spiders, took it all a step further, with a grander scope and clever interplay between two narrative viewpoints. Then came Fancy Suits and Futuristic Violence, still my favourite of his novels, an outstanding near-future sci-fi work blending action, comedy and social commentary.
So I was disappointed to conclude that his latest book missed the mark somewhat. Picking up from a few months after where Spiders left off, it finds the protagonist David, his best friend John, and girlfriend Amy still residing in their small town (location undisclosed for security reasons) and now working as something like freelance paranormal investigators. So when a child goes missing, they are called in to work out how she could have disappeared from her bedroom with no sign that anyone else had been there. Perhaps the fact she predicted her own kidnapping could have something to do with it too...
From there, the action unfolds from three perspectives as told alternately by the three protagonists, and I felt as though all of the book's shortcomings ultimately stem from this approach. It didn't help that I found all three characters much less likeable this time around, as David mopes from scene to scene, John's puerile exaggerations run out of steam and Amy's hand-wringing nervousness starts to grate very early on. And the plot is just a mess, as various monsters flit in and out, an Iraq veteran goes on the warpath, a biker gang pursue their kidnapped children and an inter-dimensional order attempts to control things. And while not enough attention is really given to any of these threads, creating a hyperactive story line, the narrative felt somehow ponderous. Without wishing to give too much away, the fact that David and John can see things for how they really are means that the actions of the other characters - their minds under the monsters' control - become frustrating and irritating. The parts told by Amy in particular do little to advance things as we already know she's not seeing the whole picture. The supporting cast are, as a consequence, underdeveloped. And I found the ending to be very weak, as hardly anything is resolved at all.
That's not to say that this book is a complete loss. The dialogue still snaps, the interactions between David and John in particular are at times genuinely funny, and Wong's imagination when it comes to creating supernatural beings really is unlike anything else I've come across. So while I don't think he's run out of ideas just yet, it would take something pretty special to keep this particular series going.
2.5/5
Here's some more supernatural, Midwestern hyperactivity:
