claire_fuller_writer's reviews
1030 reviews

Recommended by my librarian husband who absolutely loved it. Yes, nice and subtle with its subject matter, but I found the style too old-fashioned, too authorial and mannered.

Stories about ordinary lives and ordinary people, where an extraordinary thing happens, or something not so extraordinary, but it becomes so by the action of the characters. I liked them all, I like Carver's style of writing (reminding me of Richard Yates, John Williams, even Richard Ford a bit) - matter of fact. But what is striking is how these stories end. They all finish at odd, but perfect points, as if the story isn't quite ended, but it is ended enough, as though Carver has allowed the reader space to go and finish the story for ourselves. It's very brave, but it works.

I don't know why I've waited 30 years to read this, when it's been sitting on my shelves and I know I love Ian McEwan's early writing, and I did love this. It's very dark and often gruesome, but that's what I like - that many of the stories we see from the evil-character's mind. Not that even the evil-character is only one-dimensional, McEwan's writing is too clever for that.
I had some favourites: Solid geometry, Last day of summer, and First love, last rites. My least favourite was the last (which was a shame), Disguises.
I'd recommend it as long as you like bad things happening and sick people in your stories.

I liked most the conceit of this short novel: the idea that a person can hear everything (and taste some things) but not take any action. Because the narrator, inside the womb of his mother has to imagine the world outside, that world was vividly described - the dirty house, the sunshine, the wine. The story is based on / inspired by Hamlet which I don't know very well. That didn't matter at all, but what irritated me was the Shakespearean syntax that McEwan uses. The narrator plays delightfully with language, but the style of it jarred. And there was one plot point that didn't quite work:

Spoiler

at the end, in order to stop his mother and uncle escaping from the police, the narrator causes his own birth. Why didn't the narrator cause his own birth when he heard his father drinking the poisoned smoothy? Obviously if he'd done that we wouldn't have a story, but it's too easy an ending for me.

I don't read many thrillers, but I was choosing between three books and this one pulled me in from the first chapter. It's fast paced and I loved the setting: the heat and dryness of rural Australia. The characters were very real for me too. Falk has returned home for his old friend, Luke's funeral when he becomes involved in the investigation into whether Luke shot dead his family and then turned the gun on himself or whether someone else was involved. Just before Falk left the town as a teenager one of his and Luke's friends apparently drowned herself in the local river, but Falk has always been suspected of being involved.
I really enjoyed The Dry until the very end, and perhaps this is just why I need to remind myself not to pick up another thriller for a while, because it was all so neat. Far too neat for me.

Spoiler

Even down to Falk finding a rucksack belonging to the dead girl in a cavity in a tree after 20 years, and then inside it, her diary. For me, this wasn't necessary. <\spoiler> Some open ends would have made it a four star. But if you're a thriller reader, I'd recommend it.

I really liked the dark themes of this book: a girl who didn't eat and became an eel; three women who eat men and find their language repeats on them; a brother who becomes a fox. And all stories started out well for me (although sometimes it felt that the author was trying too hard with the language), but my biggest problem was that none of the stories were pushed as far as they could go. They all seemed to stop short of something even darker. The Scattering: a story in three parts was my favourite and I think that's because it was the longest, where Johnson really played with the characters and relationships, but even with this one, it felt as if it finished too early. If Johnson writes something longer I'd be interested to read it.

This started out as a four-star book: the forward momentum of the story as the narrator travels through the Congo, the terrible conditions he finds, the trek through the jungle, the river journey. And then it stumbled. Perhaps the fact that about three quarters of the novella was spent trying to reach Kurtz, by the time the narrator does, it couldn't ever be as spectacular as the build-up. And the end of the book was one endless internal musing.

This wasn't one for me. It's been on my tbr for about 3 years, and I thought I should read it or move it off. It wasn't the subject matter, although there's not denying that's difficult, it was the writing style and the repeating structure: really the same brief story told over and over by different people. The voices often sounded the same and used the same vocabulary, and nearly everything seemed overwritten.

Oh, this book. Everyone should read it. It's simple: about a family of step children, siblings, step parents and parents. And it's complicated: how children can change when they become adults, how something you did as a child can have a profound and everlasting impact. There's tragedy, but the book shows how the characters live through it, and there's things done wrong, and the book shows how we can survive that too. Forgiveness, love, just human life.
And it is beautifully written. Reading it is not like reading at all; it's like being there.
Go and read this.

I've heard about this book for years but never picked it up because, without knowing anything about it, I'd assumed from the title, it was a comedy; and comedy in books never works for me. A Visit from the Goon Squad isn't a comic book, despite its lighter sections. It's a series of perfect short stories with characters reappearing at different points throughout their lives. I loved how Egan leaves it up to the reader to make the connections; they are never laboured. The Good Squad is time, and the stories are about not being able to escape it. Some of the most touching were when Egan showed those full of energy (albeit sometimes at the expense of others) at the end of their life (Lou), and she had me gulping back tears with the single line jump into Rolph's future. The chapters at the beginning and at the end are magnificent writing. But chapter 8 'Selling the General', where Dolly, a PR freelancer fallen on hard times takes a job working for a genocidal dictator and ends up in the jungle of an unnamed country could have been written by a different author. Was it supposed to be funny? (Did I say that comedy in books never work for me?) It was inane and poorly written. Skip over that one and it's a brilliant book. Read that one, and I'd still highly recommend it.