Review of Jack & Jill

Author: James Patterson
First published in 1994
Thickness: 466 pages
Personal rating: 3 stars

In short

Someone has killed one of the most powerful men in the U.S. Senate - and the whole world is watching. Someone has murdered a small black girl on the mean streets of Washington - and no one seems to care. But only D.C. homicide cop Alex Cross suspects that the evil striking down both the high and the lowly wears the same shocking face. (www.goodreads.com)


My two cents


Jack & Jill, two killers reap fear in the hearts of the rich and powerful. They claim to be cleansing the country of bad influences and announce their crimes through various channels, with the ultimate target: the President of the United States. 


On the other side of the scales, you've got a child killer. A brutal child killer, whose actions speak beyond imagination. Two young children already beaten to dead and more to follow if he can't be stopped. 


Those are the two cases Alex Cross, prime detective, psychologist and lead character in this novel, has to solve. 
In both evil is showing its most awful face, and they both climb to an unbelievable climax. 


Personally I found the novel hard to get into. It was a little slow to captivate me, but the last fifty pages had me on the edge of my seat. I'm not a detective novel fan per se, because a lot of it has been done a million times before and the end is pretty much the same, the  crimes will be solved, good will rule over bad. 
What strikes me different about Jack and Jill is the multitude of narrations. We don't only see in the head of Alex Cross, but also those around him and even the criminals get their say, so we get a little of both. Not only the search and ultimate answer the detective is searching for, but even a glimpse at the justification of the crimes, even if it is twisted in logic.

Review of Requiem for a Dream

Author: Hubert Selby Jr.
First published in 1978
Thickness: 279 pages
Personal rating: 3 stars

In short

In this searing novel, two young hoods, Harry and Tyrone, and a girlfriend fantasize about scoring a pound of uncut heroin and getting rich. But their habit gets the better of them, consumes them and destroys their dreams. 

My two cents

Requiem for a dream is a painful novel, it is written in a very raw style and deals with themes such as addiction, devotion and desperation. 
The four lead characters all live through a descending spiral events in their lives. What begins as beautiful dreams and something to live for, ultimately becomes something they become dependent upon and what ruins every aspect of a bright future. 


Harry, the main character, is a heroin user, though not completely addicted in the beginning of the novel. Though through the influence of his best friend, Tyrone C. Love, they save to have enough money to buy a good deal of superb heroin which they in order distribute onto the streets of NY. Their summer becomes a feast of using drugs and making money, all the time having a false dream to carry them further. 
When in the end the fantastic drugs ran out and the fairy tale ends, they try to make ends meet to have enough for themselves and to sell so they have money for the next day or week's supply. 
Harry's girlfriend Marion also plays a part in the dealing and using of the heroin and is actually the katalyst for Harry's excessive usage. They drift off together, not having a real connection other than the drugs. 


Then on the other end, you have Harry's mother, Sara. A character you feel sorry for, because she's lonely in her ways, with her husband dead and her son addicted, although she doesn't admit that to herself. Whenever he comes in to steal her tv, she just prays he will be alright one day and meet a girl and give her a grandchild. 
Obsessed with television, Sara's world turns upside down when she is being phoned and told that she has been selected to star on a television show. Finally she has a reason to wake up in the morning and she focuses on the last true happy moment in her life, Harry's bar mitzvah, to prepare herself for the day. 
That means she needs to lose weight, and with being so lonesome food has become her constant companion. At first she tries a simple diet, but when that fails she turns to a doctor who gives her pills. 
The pills do have their effect, but also take their toll. When Harry pops in, he notices that his mother is on uppers and tells her to lay off of them which she doesn't. 
The television gig seems to be forgotten by the television company and she starts to obsess about it, phoning in every day, and eventually going over there. Arriving there in a confused state of mind, she is being hospitalized and wrongly threated, taking away the last shread of dignity she clutched in her fingers. 

What was clear for me, is that Harry, Marion and Tyrone are addicted, and yet they only admit it to themselves in the very end, they have become 'dope fiends', completely addicted. All through the novel they somehow retain their believe that they can quite the heroin anytime they want to. When seeing other addicts, they think themselves better than that, that they would rather die than turn out that way. 
With Sara the case is more complex. She has no idea she has been put on a diet of highly addictive pills and doesn't know how to cope with the effects. In the end she merely tries to make sense of being what she is now, not realising what has been done to her. Hers was the hardest testimony to read, the uther helplessness. 


Requiem for a dream is a good novel, it's written in quite an unusual way, with as less punctuation as possible. The movie adaption is also quite good, which I saw before I read the novel. 
I recommend it, but I must warn you it's not a book you'll breeze through and it will haunt you for a while afterwards.

Liebster blog award!

Wow, I had no clue that such awards were giving out. Not what I had in mind when I started this blog, I would've been happy to reach out to just one or two eager readers, but the bookblogging universe is much more vast than I could've imagined.
Thanks to Holly at Full Moon Bites for nominating me.

This award is meant to grant a spotlight for those bloggers who have less than 200 bloggers, to give them a chance to be noticed by the enormous amount of avid readers.

The rules of this award are:

1. Thank the giver and link back to the blogger who gave it to you.

2. Reveal your top 5 picks and let them know by leaving a comment on their blog.

3. Copy and paste the award on your blog.

4. Have faith that your followers will spread the love to other bloggers.

5. And most of all - have bloggity-blog fun!

 

And the nominees are........ (drumroll)

1. Leighanne at Leighanne's Lit

2. AnnMarie at Annmarie's Reviews

3. Supercalifragiliciousreads

4. Jenny at Reading Envy

5. Janet at Blahblahbidyblah

And thanks again Holly!! :)

Necronomicon (The commemorative edition)

Author: H.P. Lovecraft
First published in 1922
Thickness: 895 pages
Personal rating: 1 star, but actually didn't finish it

In short

Originally written for the pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s, H. P. Lovecraft's astonishing tales blend elements of horror, science fiction, and cosmic terror that are as powerful today as they were when they were first published.

This tome brings together all of Lovecraft's harrowing stories, including the complete Cthulhu Mythos cycle, just the way they were first released.

It will introduce a whole new generation of readers to Lovecraft's fiction, as well as attract those fans who want all his work in a single, definitive volume. (www.goodreads.com)


My two cents 
 
H.P. Lovecraft, as an avid and constant reader of Stephen King and alike, this was a name continuously turning up when they talked about a large influence in their writing style. With having quite the inquisitive nature, I couldn't but try my hands on him at least once. Add to that my tendency to overdo it, I bought this giant edition when my eye first fell on it. 


To say the least, it was disappointing. I had high hopes, but they didn't come true. Having been brought up with the fantastic King tales, I just don't get what all the fuss is about where HP Lovecraft is concerned. I understand that in earlier times, this was all they had and it was better than nothing at all, but today's authors took his initial attempts at the horror and thrill and mastered it wonderfully. 


His stories are dated, and I don't get any thrill but a sigh of boredom once in a while. His tales are longwinded with too many adjectives, sometimes it felt like I was reading a dictionary. 
This is a novel where I quite trying after about 200 pages and those were a struggle as it was. Nope, give me modern horror, not from a century ago.

Review of Lady Chatterley's Lover

Author: D.H. Lawrence
Published in 1928
Thickness: 376 pages
Personal rating: 3 stars

In short


The story concerns a young married woman, Constance (Lady Chatterley), whose upper-class husband, Clifford Chatterley, has been paralyzed and rendered impotent. Her sexual frustration leads her into an affair with the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. This novel is about Constance's realisation that she cannot live with the mind alone; she must also be alive physically. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Chatterley%27s_Lover)


My two cents

My first impression of this novel was not of a good nature. I found the beginning to be excrutiatingly longwinding and boring. A good deal over its midst, the novel began to be interesting, with the love affair between her and her gamekeeper and its far reaching results. 

Lady Chatterley, a woman of questionable moral, is married to a nobleman who got wounded in the war and lost the function of his lower body. Chained to a sexless marriage and with love slowly seeping out, Lady Chatterley, also named Connie, seeks her thrills elsewhere. Do not think this is impulsive or even selfish of her, since she nearly breaks down from the lack of physical and emotional love. Only the warm touch of one servant, the game-keeper, makes her sky clear again and her vision for the future bright. 

Having been brought up quite liberally with having had the permission for an affair while she was away at college, her father had tried to coerce her husband into letting her have a love affair, afraid she would be turning into a demi-virgin. A virgin, not of mind, but of body.
Her husband, Sir Clifford, gave her that permission and even granted her the wish to conceive a child with the unknown party, as long as he himself never had to know any details. 

Connie, betrayed by her first lover on an emotional base, tries to seek refuge in her world, but finds only superficial men who treat love as if it be a verb instead of something that is or isn’t. Women do not have meaning in their life, or they depend too much upon them. Neither is what Connie seeks and falling away in apathy she breaks down in tears in front of the game keeper, who sees her for who she is and straightforwardly gives her what she needs, even if it took her a while to see it for what it was.
Mellors, the gamekeeper, has been searching for a true woman all his life, a woman who isn’t afraid of the sexual act and who doesn’t use it to get her way or as punishment. 

Through the sexual escapades between him and Connie, he begins to learn how a true love affair is supposed to be like and despite his ironic and pessimistic demeanor, when Connie tells him she’s expecting his child, he has given her his heart and they will try to be together however difficult the odds. 

I know I’ve told a lot of spoilers in my summary, but this novel isn’t so much about the content as it goes about an age changing. The age of noblemen making way for the industrialization. The fall of one empire, to give life to another.