My life is undoubtedly horrible! I haven’t read a book of my own free will for almost a week. The reason for this (for of course I have a reason) was that I was going to start reading Jane Eyre, seeing as I was planning on using it for an extremely important essay, but then I couldn’t find the teacher I was going to talk to, and I didn’t want to start until I had talked to her. Now that we (the teacher and I) have decided that the essay I first thought of would be rather arse, I do not now have to read Jane Eyre as well as other related books, so technically, I’m free. So. Um. Expect more reviews soon! On Thursday at the latest (by then I should have finished Medea, which I’m reading for Swedish at the moment).

HOWEVER, Love tagged me for a meme, and I can’t say no to memes! Here are her answers, if you are curious. And here are my:

Which book do you irrationally cringe away from reading, despite seeing only positive reviews?
There are two authors I would never ever read: Jan Guillou and Liza Marklund. They are both (or, Liza Marklund is a has-been now, isn’t she?) extremely selfpleased and seem to think that they are geniuses, despite barely being able to put one word after another. I have only read a handful of paragraphs of each, but that was more than enough. And I don’t know if they only get positive reviews, but a majority of the Swedish population seems to have these two authors as their favourites. (I can’t remember seeing a properly bad review for either authors, but I know that Guillou’s Arn-film got lots of bad reviews - one critic, my favourite critic ever, was a bit too lenient when grading it, and realised it later, and paid the cinema-goers with money from his own pocket. It’s a nice story.)

If you could bring three characters to life for a social event (afternoon tea, a night of clubbing, perhaps a world cruise), who would they be and what would the event be?
Gosh. I must admit being very fond of afternoon tea, so that would be the event. My first guest would proabably be William Dobbin from Vanity Fair. I love Dobbin so much. He is one of the few characters who have actually made me so passionate that I have screamed at pages. IT IS TRUE. Secondly, I must go with Remus Lupin from the Harry Potter-books. He, as well, is a great favourite. Thirdly… hm. This is difficult. I wouldn’t mind Kurda Smahlt from the Darren Shan-books to come around.

Hah. Looking at these three guests, it is quite easy to see what sort of person I like. All of them gentle and wanting the best for everyone, at the cost of their own happiness or welfare or so. Of course, there are characters I adore even more (Acheron Hades from The Eyre Affair is most likely my favourite character ever), but I wouldn’t want to drink tea with them. Getting murdered in the afternoon is not the plan of my life.

(Borrowing shamelessly from the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde): you are told you can’t die until you read the most boring novel on the planet. While this immortality is great for awhile, eventually you realise it’s past time to die. Which book would you expect to get you a nice grave?
This is difficult. I do my best to steer clear of books that bore me, so I don’t really know. There was this one book that I tried to read twice, ages apart, and I simply couldn’t get through it. Unfortunately, I can’t really remember the title of it. It was about the history of science, and claimed that there was nothing tinier than an atom.

Come on, we’ve all been there. Which book have you pretended, or at least hinted, that you’ve read, when in fact you’ve been nowhere near it?
Ah, too many. Lots and lots of books. Mainly classics (such as Jane Eyre). And, actually, I haven’t really hinted as much as other people have assumed I’ve read them, and I haven’t bothered correcting them. People believe I am the most well-read persone anyway. Breaking their hearts with the truth would be a little harsh.

As an addition to the last question, has there been a book that you really thought you had read, only to realise when you read a review about it/go to ‘reread’ it that you haven’t? Which book?
Hm. I don’t really know, acutally. There might have been one or two, but there are none I can recall at the moment.
You’re interviewing for the post of Official Book Advisor to some VIP (who’s not a big reader). What’s the first book you’d recommend and why? (if you feel like you’d have to know the person, go ahead of personalise the VIP)
This depends on what kind of person this person seems to be. If the VIP seems really stuffy, I might recommend something like Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, which I think is a very pleasant book, which has pirates and lots of relevant issues (like family!). If the VIP seems to have a sense of humour, I would go with Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, as it’s an extremely clever, well-written and amusing novel.

A good fairy comes and grants you one wish: you will have perfect reading comprehension in the foreign language of your choice. Which language do you go with?
I have to go with Russian. I have read extremely little Russian literature, but I aspire to mend this fault. I am currently trying to learn Russian, although I am still on an extremely elementary level (I can tell whoever that I love them, but I can’t swear if I bump my toe). My Russian teacher mentioned once that Russian is extremely rich in synonyms, with only a slight difference between the meanings, creating a nuanced and incredibly language.

…also, being able to say that you have read Dostoyevsky in Russian is really kind of cool. Да.

A mischievious fairy comes and says that you must choose one book that you will reread once a year for the rest of your life (you can read other books as well). Which book would you pick?
God. Um. I really don’t know. A year is such a long time! Or maybe it isn’t. Hm. I might be a bit lame, but I think I’ll go - for the moment at least - with Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban, which is by far the best Harry Potter book, and Voldemort never makes an appearance, which is just A+.
I know that the book blogging community, and its various challenges, have pushed my reading borders. What’s one bookish thing you ‘discovered’ from book blogging (maybe a new genre, or author, or new appreciation for cover art-anything)?
Um. Book challenges? I really haven’t discovered much. I am a little lame like that.
That good fairy is back for one final visit. Now, she’s granting you your dream library! Describe it. Is everything leatherbound? Is it full of first edition hardcovers? Pristine trade paperbacks? Perhaps a few favourite authors have inscribed their works? Go ahead-let your imagination run free.
I have a thing for hardcovers with pretty covers. Books in the same series should match. If books are unavailable in hardcover, they should stay the fuck out of those shelves. There would be place for them too, but maybe not as much. Everything is sorted by main genre (novels, plays, poetry, &c), by surname and by original publishing date. Not too many omnibus - it makes it so difficult to count the books. I would like some way of making sure that my books are MY books with some sort of ad libris or something a little less ugly than my scrawled blocks of a name in capital letters and a phone number. The shelves would be well-filled. And hm. More.

(it is just past midnight, so some of these answers might be completely bonkers. I do apologise.)

The History Boys
Alan Bennett
109 p + xxvii p

Faber & Faber, 2004.

Back cover blurb:

An unruly bunch of bright, funny sixth-form boys in pursuit of sex, sport and a place at university. A maverick English teacher at odds with the young and shrewd supply teacer. A headmaster obsessed with results; a history teacher who thinks he’s a fool.

In Alan Bennett’s new play, staff-room rivalry and the anarchy of adolescence provoke insistent questions about history and how you teach it; about education and its purpose.

Let’s be honest: I saw the film before I read the play. However, seeing as the differences between the two are so tiny, it doesn’t matter much. I instantly fell in love with the story. I adore Cambridge as a town, and even the slightest mention of it makes me giddy. (My sister got accepted to an undergraduate there, which means I will soon have a reason for going there, apart from homesickness.) Cambridge is mentioned not all the time, but a lot of the time. Oxford is also big, but I’ve never been there, and I don’t have any kind of relationship with that place. Now, the thing is that I don’t want to study in Cambridge. One person in my family’s going there, why should I? It wasn’t Cambridge that was the reason I loved this play so much.

It was the characters and their relationships I completely fell for. They are all so beautiful. Some of them are right arses, but they are described with so much vigour that even the worst people seem interesting. There are extremely few characters - even I, with a memory of about five minutes, can keep track of them. Posner is in love with Dakin, who in turn gets more or less with obsessed with their new teacher, Irwin. This subtle homosexuality, obviously there but never too apparent, was aweinspiring. It is gay at its best. It’s not deemed unnatural, but nor is it that everyone is gay. The cast is almost completely male, with one female teacher, who is fantastic. All of these characters are people I would love to talk to, if only for just a little bit. (I must admit that I wouldn’t want to spend too mcuh time with Dakin, who is a little nasty, despite being extremely fascinating.)

And the language! It is fluid and gentle and honest and it flows like a river. It is sprinkled with references I can and cannot place, incorporated like the most natural thing in the world. They quote poems and songs from the thirties; they know all the words to When I’m Cleaning Windows off by heart. I love George Formby. It’s these small things that makes it is such a joy to read. In the film they play the intro to This Charming Man, which had me in fits of fannish glee. (yes yes yes, I know, you shouldn’t let your opinions of a film influence your opinion of the work it’s based on.)

Now I really want to see the play staged. And I want to see the film again. And then, maybe, I shall read the play again. It was good enough to.

Bilbo: en hobbits äventyr
(The Hobbit or There And Back Again)
J.R.R. Tolkien
Translated by Britt G. Hallqvist
Illustrations by Tove Jansson
308 p.

Rabén & Sjögren, 1962
(first published 1937 by George Allen & Unwin Ltd.)

For Decades ‘08 and Here Be Dragons.

Back cover blurb:

none

I read this book a year or so before the first Lord of the Rings film was released, and it took longer time still before I actually realised that the upcoming film and the book I had read some time before were even connected. (what can I say? I wasn’t a particularly bright kid, and I’m still daft.) I read it in the same version as I did now, an older translation and beautiful pictures by Tove Jansson (who, if you don’t recognise the name or the style, also wrote and drew the Moomin-stories, as well as illustrated several other childrens’ novels). It is a lovely translation, and it isn’t often I can say that. Admittedly, I sometimes started wondering if the text was only translated, or if it had been altered in any way. As I have never read The Hobbit in English, I can’t tell. The style of writing is vastly different from the one he came to use when writing Lord of the Rings, which I haven’t read in English either. I am a little ashamed, yes.

Now, when I was tiny, I loved this book. When I later read Lord of the Rings, I loved that even more. I was completely enraptured by these hobbits and dwarves and men who were so amazing and different from any other thing I’d read. I never particularly liked the elves, I thought them self-important and more than a little egotistical. The humans were the ones for me. Still, I thought them the best books ever published. I never re-read The Hobbit, which is a little peculiar, but the trilogy I read three or four times. Completely brilliant. Now, when I read it again, I started to feel a little nervous. After fifty pages I didn’t enjoy it at all as much as I ought to. I ought to swoon and go “Oh Tolkien!” in wonder, but these swoons were illuminating in their absence. It was very alarming. And quite upsetting. I really wanted to love this book as much as I did when I was ten.

In the end I didn’t. I liked it more than I did when I started, but it never filled me with that alarming sense of joy that was present the first time. I liked the middle a lot. The middle made me happy. The end confused me a bit, because I had got a strong idea of what was going to happen: the dwarves were going to hunt down the dragon and everything was going to be hunky-dory. Of course, this didn’t happen. I remembered vaguely what was going to happen - who was going to do the dragon in and a few of who were dying. That didn’t match with my view of what should happen. When the great battle started I found myself disappointed again, because in my mind, a great big battle wasn’t really justified for this. The orcs hadn’t been that important before and the dragon was the fiend! Battles where hundreds of people die are not necessary! I guess reading a few Tolkien-ripoffs has taken its toll already. That it ricochetted on Tolkien himself was a bit of misery, though.

I don’t mean that I didn’t enjoy it. I did enjoy it, but with the expectation so high, I loved it less than I wanted to. When I reread it, in several years, I will probably read it in English. This translation is beautiful, the poems and songs are fantastic, but reading the original is always nice. If we had owned it in English (which we don’t. We have a copy of the first edition of Silmarillion, a book it is highly unlikely I’ll read again, but not The Hobbit in English. Two in Swedish, though.), I would have read it in that language. This one copy I read is so worn and loved that the back has fallen off and the spine is leaving. The edges are banged and frayed. Still, it is a lovely edition of a more than decent book.

Dracula
Bram Stoker
402 p.

Penguin Red, 2006
(first published 1897 by Archibald Constable and Company)

For Decades ‘08.

Back cover blurb:

Count Dracula’s castle is a hellish world where night is day, pleasure is pain and the blood of the innocent is prized above all. Young Jonathan Harker approaches the gloomy gates with no idea of what he is about to face…

And back in England eerie incidents are unfolding as strange puncture marks appear on a young woman’s neck. Can Harker’s fiancée be saved? And where is the evil Dracula?

The blurb above is a bit misguiding, but seeing as almost anyone can tell you what the book is about, it doesn’tbother me much. It is an extremely good novel. Like a lot of people (probably), I have been exposed to the Dracula-story uncountable times; I’ve seen lots of different film versions and parodies and all sorts of things. My sister was a bit of a vampire-buff, but I never got around to read Dracula. Until now, of course. And it is brilliant, it really is. The found I almost found best was that the characters were so full of life. They were believable and felt as though they could have been real. Most characters in books from this century seem to be quite stiff and don’t show much emotion. These characters do. The men in it embrace each other and cry and show a lot of affection to each other. I love that. Van Helsing, the slightly mad but yet so brilliant professor in almost every subject, was the sort of character I wanted to give a real big hug because he seemed so sad. My favourite character, who seems to be changed a lot in most of the filmed version, is Dr. Seward, who is gently and noble and loyal, the kind of traits I wish I would have, but sadly don’t. Dr. Seward is also a bit of tech geek (yes, in that day and age), and it was fantastic to see how he longs for his phonograph (a kind of gramophone) when he has been forced to write by hand.

Dracula is narrated by several different characters, in the form of journal entries and letters. Unlike many novels of this kind, the reason why they write a journal is justified; every character seems to have a reason for setting down their thoughts. The characters read each other’s journals and together they form a beautiful entirety. There were two things I did not love about this novel. One of them was how Mina and Jonathan Harker were very wussy at times. If they had not been in love and married, I would not have any problem with them. The other problem was a little note at the end of the novel, telling us that everyone was happily married and they had children and all sorts of things. It felt a bit over-the-top. But then again (as my sister said) it is Victorian. And they were a little strange.

edit. I forgot about this as it wasn’t that annoying, but there was one more thing; the footnotes were missing. They were marked out and everything, but there were no footnotes. I guess it was a relief, because it takes so much time to turn to the back all the time.