Review: Lord of the Flies

Disclaimer: I read this novel, and the novels in the upcoming reviews, quite a while ago (mostly during the summer). Therefore, these reviews will be a little bit short and simple because I took no notes etc.

Title: Lord of the Flies

Author: William Golding

Genre: Young adult / Classic

Year: 1954

Pages: 202

A plane crashes on an island. Only children survive. For them, this first appears a utopia: no adult supervision, Ultimate freedom. This changes quickly. Fights about who is to lead. The youngest children scared for a 'monster'. The perfect world collapses into a nightmare.

     While I was aware of the horrifying turn the novel would make later on, the beginning of the novel felt like an adventure story. Perhaps I had understood other people wrongly, maybe this was not such a haunting story. Obviously, I was too naive, and the tone of the story changed quickly.
     In the very beginning, already, there is the notion of power, of leadership. Who is to lead the group? Even when we've only been introduced to two characters, there is already a clear 'superior'. When more children come together, this battle becomes even more intense. Without authority, the children immediately decided some structure was needed, tasks also are divided. However, this results in multiple quarrels. Reading the novel critically, the novel never starts out as an excitin adventure, it's already a dramatic horror story to begin with.
    The structure they impose on themselves may delude the reader into thinking the children have it all together. Alright, there is a struggle on whom is to do what, but there's no real harm in that. Quickly, though, the children turn into savages, and the slight order they had is turned around. They split up into two camps who fight eachother brutally and this is when any reader will be disgusted and terrified.
     A few things bothered me about this novel, probably all related to the fact that it is a children's book. The writing style was, to me, uncompelling, and resulted in me having a hard time reading the novel quickly as I was unable to concentrate for too long. I cannot truly remember what it was about the style, but I feel like it is likely a result of Golding's eyed audience. This is also the case in terms of morals: they are too obvious which annoyed me.
    However, Golding makes up for this by writing no single sentence without allusions. Any sentence can be analysed, and on each page one can write a three thousand word essay. This is interesting and extremely entertaining, but only to a certain extend. I could not be bothered to actually look into each word in great depth, as that would slow down my reading so much, and honestly, I can only bring myself to doing that for some of my favourite novels, and this one is not one.
     I do feel everyone should have read it. It is a classic, and it is rightly so.

November Book Haul

I decided to make a little post about the few books I bought a while back in Amsterdam.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows
I must admit that this is a title buy. I don't know too much about it, other than that it's set in Guernsey and during the Second World War.

The Shock of the Fall - Nathan Filer
"I'll tell you what happened because it will be a good way to introduce my brother. His name's Simon. I think you're going to like him. I really do. But in a couple of pages he'll be dead. And he was never the same after that"
The blurb is really all I know about this one, and it sounds so intriguing to me. Also, a lot of people on booktube have been reading and loving it.

Unravel Me - Tahereh Mafi
This is the second book in the Shatter Me trilogy. I can't tell you too much about it without spoiling the first book, so if you care to know what the first book is about, check out my review.

Cinder - Marissa Meyer
This is the first one in a series of retellings of fairy tales. In this one, Cinder(ella) is a mechanic in New Beijing, but also a cyborg. When a disease is spreading, Cinder's life changes dramatically.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
I actually did not buy this book in Amsterdam, but I thought I'd include it in here. This is basically a history of Anglo-Saxon times, written back then. Obviously, this has been translated. I've read a few entries in Old English back when I took a course on that, and I was excited  when I found this for a few Euros in an antique book store.

Top 5 Wednesday: Titles

I thought I'd do a quick top 5 Wednesday! Today's topic is favourite titles. This entry will be short as I feel my answers need no explanation. In no particular order, these are my favourite titles (of novels I own):

1. The Little Old Lady Who Broke All The Rules
2. Aristotle and Dante Discover  the Secrets of the Universe
3. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
4. The Night Circus
5. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children


*I've lent out my copy of The Little Old Lady which is why the picture doesn't include it*

Top 5 Wednesday was created by Lainey. Check out the goodreads group.

Review: The Night Circus

Title: The Night Circus

Author: Erin Morgenstern

Genre: Adult magic/fantasy 

Year: 2010

Pages: 508

Firstly, I want to point out that I went into this novel without knowing anything about it. I did not even read the back. Honestly, I would recommend doing the same thing, as to me it was part of the mystery of the novel. Even though this review will be spoiler free - I won't talk about anything that is not in the blurb - a tiny bit of the plot is revealed in the next paragraph.

So first, a minor summary: Cecilia is six years old when her father enrols her in a challenge. She has no clue what the exact rules are, nor does she know who her opponent is, or even when and where the game will take place.

There are many aspects to this novel I adored, and only few I did not. As I want this review to end on a happy note, I plan to discuss the negative parts first. This mostly has to do with the pace. I felt the story progressed rather slowly throughout the first 3/4th. Now, I did not mind that at all, although it did give me the impression it took forever to get through. Then the final, say, 100 pages, all of a sudden went extremely fast which resulted in only little explanation of what was going on, even though I felt that especially the events could do with some more explanation. While the magic throughout the novel felt quite realistic, as far that's possible, in the end I simply couldn't wrap my head around it.

Apart from that, the novel is near perfect - Morgenstern's writing is easy, yet beautiful. The description of both environment (the circus, wow!) and characters is impeccable; even non-magical things sounded magical in her words. The mystery, the suspense, it was all so well thought through it kept me on the edge of my seat the entire time. The novel takes place over quite some years and thus character development is certainly something to be expected in this story. While this is not really done explicitly, when looking back at the main characters, there are certainly some changes in personality, all of which understandable and realistic, adding to the strange sense of familiarity and credibility created in this novel.

What weirdly enough also contributes to this, is the magical feeling of the circus. We want to visit it so badly, perhaps even join it - experience the magic from up close. Never before have I been engrossed in a world so much that I felt such a strong desire to be there. It is difficult to explain how exactly that makes the world more believable, but trust me, it does.

All I really have left to say is that I want all of you to read this beautiful tale. It is not quite fantasy, but too much magic for magical realism. So don't think it's not your cup of tea because you don't like either of those. Also, this is not young adult. For content, there really is no reason, but I do believe it is a bit more sophisticated in plot and writing than your average YA. 

University

In the beginning of September, I wrote quite a few reviews and was able to post regularly, even though I had started my final year of university. Unfortunately, although I really wanted to continue, it soon became clear that I had no time for reading (reading novels, that is), and thus no content to post on this blog.

I will try to pick this back up again soon, as for next term (our year is devided into four parts rather than two semesters) I will have to read about 15 novels. I will have time to think about them thoroughly as we will be discussing in detail at school and thus I will hopefully have inspiration to write a review.

If you did not know, I'm a student of Literature and Cultural Criticism. This is a one year master's programme, and before this I did my bachelor's in English Language and Culture. As you may expect, the first term of a degree in criticism involves reading a lot of (philosophical) theory. This means I do have to read a lot for uni, just not novels. I am currently reading Seeing by José Saramago and this is for a course, but it literally is the only piece of pure literature I will be reading.

This all does not mean that I have reviewed all the books I read this year so far. I do in fact have about 4 books I still want to write about but as I read them in the summer, it feels like a long time ago and I'm not sure whether I will actually be able to write something decent.

Anyway, this was all just an apology, really. Soon, I will be posting regularly again.

If you want to see what I'm up to, go and follow me on twitter, instagram, or goodreads!

Review: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Title: Fahrenheit 451

Author: Ray Bradbury

Genre: Science Fiction

Year: 1953

Pages: 159

Fahrenheit 451 is set in a dystopian world in which it is strictly forbidden to own books, and firemen are to make sure this law is complied with. Their job is to burn books, and if needed the houses in which these are hidden.

Our protagonist, Guy Montag, is one of these firemen. Not aware of the fact that once books were allowed to be read, and firemen actually put out fires, he never questioned his occupation. Not until he meets his new seventeen-year-old neighbour who teaches him to think independently.

I thought the concept of this story was pretty well thought out, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. The characters are well-developed, as well as the world. Most remarkable perhaps, was the realistic feel to it. Whenever Bradbury had a character explain the workings of the world, it almost sounded rational, and as if it could happen in real life.

When reading reviews written by women on this book, I noticed the feminist point-of-view: women are portrayed as stupid and brainwashed and of the books mentioned, no author is female. I’m not at all used to feminist reading, and thus had not noticed the latter. The former remark, however, I feel is unjustified. Every single person in this novel is at some point brainwashed – men too. I would even like to argue that the most important character in this novel is female: Clarice. She is the instigator – without her, Montag would have remained naïve in terms of his profession. To me thus, it feels inappropriate to mark Bradbury, or at least this novel, misogynist.

Though I was compelled by the story, the ending seemed rather incoherent – both in relation to the rest of the novel, as well as by itself. I was confused as I kept losing track of the story line, and I felt the ending just did not suite the over-all style and ambience. I will, however, not go in too much detail about this, as I want this to remain spoiler-free.

There was another aspect of this novel I felt dubious about: although the story is critical towards society in so many sophisticated ways, the general moral seems cliché: television ruins you, read books instead! Although I understand this is not at all all Bradbury tries to convey, it is the undertone throughout the novel, and it felt too basic for the potential this book had.

Review: Fangirl

Title: Fangirl

Author: Rainbow Rowell 

Genre: YA Contemporary

Year: 2013

Pages: 461

“Cath and Wren are identical twins and until recently they did absolutely everything together. Now they’re off to university and Wren’s decided she doesn’t want to be one half of a pair any more – she wants to dance, meet boys, go to parties and let loose. It’s not so easy for Cath. She would rather bury herself in the fanfiction she writes where there’s romance far more intense than anything she’s experienced in real life”

Fact is, this was just such an enjoyable read. I read it within a day and I fell in love with every single (main-ish) character. Compared to other current YA authors, Rowell’s writing is phenomenal, and she certainly has a way of writing characters every girl can relate to. Honestly, I would recommend it to anyone (female, that is). You do not have to be a fangirl, write or even read fanfiction. I don’t, and I loved it. However, the fanfiction is sort of why I did not rate it 5 stars: I was just not interested in the parts about Simon Snow. Perhaps this was because I never really was a huge Harry Potter fan growing up? (shame on me).