Month: August 2019

TBR Challenge – A Room With A View – E.M. Forster

On By kepagewriterIn Book Reviews, TBR Pile Challenge 20191 Comment

Genre: Classics, Romance

Narrative Style: third person, chronological

Rating: 3/5

Published: 1908

Format: Paperback

Synopsis: Lucy is on holiday in Florence with her chaperone at the start of the novel. She is keen to experience life but is often hampered by the mores of the day and her conventional chaperone, Miss Bartlett. Her life is unbalanced when she meets the unconventional Emersons, particularly the son George. When she returns to England, her life no longer seems so straightforward. 

Reading Challenge – The 2019 TBR Challenge

Time on Shelf – about 5 years. This was inherited from my husband’s aunt. I felt I ought to read it rather than wanting to so I put it on the list to make sure that I did.

I definitely have mixed about A Room with a View. I liked it better than Where Angels fear to Tread which is the only other Forster I have read but I really didn’t like that so it’s not saying much. In a lot of ways, I feel about Forster like I feel about Austen. The writing is clever and sharp but ultimately doesn’t move me.

When I read Where Angels Fear to Tread, I thought I’d never met a writer who seemed so ill at ease with his own masculinity and that of other men. In this novel, it seemed that the unease could be extended to the whole human race. Forster observes his characters well but I felt he was removed from them. And as such, they seemed more like representations of certain ways of being rather than fully drawn characters.

The story itself is very simple. Lucy feels obliged to marry a man she does not love because he is from the right social class. She has to choose between him and the unconventional George, who works on the railways. Part of the problem is that we do not see that much of George so it is hard to understand exactly what it is that is so loveable about him.

I’m not a big fan of romance. And for all the social observation and cleverness that is all this is. It’s not a terrible book. It was pleasant to read, just not for me.

TBR Challenge – You Really Got Me: The Story of the Kinks – Nick Hasted

On By kepagewriterIn TBR Pile Challenge 2019Leave a comment

Genre: Music, Biography

Narrative Style: Third Person, Chronological

Rating: 4/5

Published: 2011

Format: Hardback

Synopsis: Hasted takes the story from The Kinks origins in the early sixties up to the modern day. Using interviews with original members, he traces the history of one of the sixties most interesting bands.

Reading Challenges: TBR Challenge 2019

Time on the shelf: This was bought when it first came out in 2011 as my husband is a bit of a Kinks obsessive. 

I’ve always liked The Kinks. Some of my favourite songs were written by one of the Davies brothers – Waterloo Sunset, Stop Your Sobbing, Death of a Clown to name but three. Having read two of Ray’s books – X-Ray and Americana – I thought it would be good to get a less biased view of what life with The Kinks was like.

It seems that life with The Kinks was dramatic and even life threatening. This biography is filled with incidents that if one or two of them happened to a band you might consider them unlucky. Not helped by the almost constant fighting between the Davis brothers and between them and other band members. Pete Quaife started to travel with the roadies to escape the constant fighting and ended up nearly dying in a car crash. Mick Avory threw his cymbal at Dave on stage, knocking him out and immediately went on the run. There are many other incidents that would have felled lesser bands but somehow The Kinks kept going.

There is also insight into the writing of the songs and the mindset of Ray and Dave Davies. Hasted uses a lot of quotations from various interviews so the reader gets a genuine insight into the creation of some of the most iconic songs of the sixties. However, this use of quotes from the various band members, and other involved parties, does break the narrative up and I would have liked more straight reporting of events.

However, this isn’t really an unbiased look. Hasted is obviously a huge fan and you would have to be to be able to write this book and still love all involved afterwards. Both Ray and Dave are very difficult people and their personal histories are filled with failed marriages and bad behaviour. The worst of which – such as Ray’s troubled relationship with Chrissie Hynde – were glossed over and not really investigated. Bad behaviour is reported but not really commented on.

Another thing that I found annoying was Halstad’s insistence that The Kinks were the only band that were any good or meant anything. Generally, when another band or song was mentioned, it was in a critical light. Okay, so the Kinks are very good but that doesn’t mean that everything else was rubbish.

Overall, this was an entertaining read. It certainly made me wonder how on earth they kept turning out hit after hit when they could hardly stand to be in the same room together.