Heart of a Dog - Mikhail Bulgakov

 

A neighbour left a whole bunch of novels by some of my favourite authors in a box on a doorstep. When I saw it I was running back home. I stopped. I dove into the box. And I came out with this, with a bunch of books by Coetzee, some by Eugenides, some 19th century classics, and had a good backpack full of books (needless to say, that last 1 km back home was a tad bit slower than the previous ones...). 

Only thing: in my oxygen-deprived state my mind swapped Bulgakov and Nabokov (I can't be the first one, though that's no excuse). I had found The Master and Margarita to be ponderous and self-indulgent, but having got this book anyway I decided to read it (also because, in all honesty, it's very short...). 

Turns out, I don't particularly like dogs, I don't particularly like Bulgakov, and I don't particularly like mad doctors playing god with brain transplants. I also don't particularly like allegoric depictions of the Soviet Union characterized by a sense of humour that was probably dated already in the 1920s. 

So, guess what, I didn't particularly like this book...

The Lost World - Michael Crichton

  

Not even the best book with its title (Arthur Conan Doyle wins hands down, unsurpisingly), but I have to admit that this novel was what I believe people label - rightfully - a page turner. 

The pace is quick, the chapters short, the actions packed over the span of 24 hours (or maybe 48 or thereabouts? I've read it a while ago and don't quite remember) and dinosaurs remain fascinating creatures (though this isn't quite a Crichton invention). 

The prose is terrible, the vocabulary limited and the science (or science fiction) feels a bit too accessible for someone who only ever did a bit of basic biology and chemistry in school, but the book is ultimately a good couple of hours of pretty good low-maintenance entertainment.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick

Well, I thought I was going to like the book because of its absolutely amazing title and because, after all, it is the one that inspired Blade Runner (though the decision of the publisher of my edition to even change the title into Blade Runner is just offensive).

But I didn't enjoy it all. I can live with the dramatic differences in Rachael's character and there are plenty of interesting things that the movie does not touch upon (the importance of animals, for instance), but can i say that the book is just not particularly well-written? Do I sound like an obnoxious snob if I say that Dick's prose is underdeveloped?

Expectations were high - despite my lack of interest in sci-fi I was more than happy to give one of its greatest authors a try, but said expectations were not met. Not even remotely.

Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

A 30p investment at the Barbican library worth – at the very least – every penny!

Jokes aside, Cloud Atlas was a rather enjoyable read, but also a very uneven one. Some of its chapters were brilliant (Timothy Cavendish and his misadventures in the nursing home, Massa Ewing sailing in the Pacific and facing death, Robert Frobisher writing the Cloud Atlas Sextet), while others were, well, not so brilliant.

Luisa Rey’s story reads like little more than a Tom Clancy novel (if you are looking for Californian greed and corporate aggression I think you are much better off opening a token Ellroy novel), the interview to Sonmi-451 would probably leave Vonnegut of Dick rather unimpressed, and I’m not exactly sure of where I stand on Sloosha Crossing as, despite me being a pseudo-bilingual (if not trilingual) reader, I really struggled with the imagined dialect of the future…

It is a best-seller after all, but one that I’m really glad to have read (although it’s not going to enter my list of favourite books anytime soon).

A Cidadela Inventada – Pihba Cavalcanti

And for my 150^th post, a book by, erm, my father in law (and with this second one, I promise, I am done with books by family, friends, etc.). Jokes aside, a couple of years ago every bookstore in Brazil had a few copies of the novel, so it actually deserves to be here in its own right.

The book is a clear declaration of love from its author to his city (Recife, in Pernambuco – Brazil) and the amount of research that has gone into its more historic pages is really impressive. All the characters are funny, if a bit goofy, and the reader is naturally drawn to them.

As I predicted, I enjoyed the sections of the novel that deal with the development of the city during the Dutch period much more than the dream-like science-fiction (it’s not a coincidence that one of the author’s favourite books is Calvino’s Cosmicomiche). Also, I read the book in Portuguese, a language I can read only reasonably well and can’t speak at all, so a number of the subtleties of the novel probably escaped me (that said, I discovered some amusing assonances between Portuguese and the Piedmontese dialect – something that I found utterly random...).

Galapagos – Kurt Vonnegut

I thought this was going to be the first properly sci-fi Vonnegut book I would read (the only other I ever read was Slaughterhouse 5, and I tend to consider this more as a funky historical novel). As it turns out, this book is more about the lives of a few castaways than about the genetic mutations that the human race undergoes over a million years.

Entertaining and funny, I really wish the book would also tell the reader what actually happened with all those humans who didn’t have the luxury of getting stranded in the Galapagos. Standard nuclear apocalypse? Usual alien attack? I wish I knew…

Luckily, there is a cuddly and furry Japanese seal-baby. Kind of wish I could see one of those…