Tag: The Red House

Meme – My Life in Literature

Posted August 3, 2012 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Random / 0 Comments

This is a tag that I saw on A Room of One’s Own and then a few other blogs so I thought it might be interesting to get involved too. Basically you answer all the questions with the books you’ve read this year to reflect your own life.

Describe Yourself: A Perfectly Good Man
How Do You Feel: Limitless
Describe Where You Currently Live: The Red House
If You Could Go Anywhere, Where Would You Go: Empire State
Your Favorite Form of Transportation: Drive
Your Best Friend is: The Devil all The Time
You and Your Friends are: Beneath the Darkening Sky
What’s the Weather Like: A Brewing Storm
You Fear: The Gunslinger
What’s the Best Advice You Have to Give: Beat the Reaper
Thought For the Day: I Want My Hat Back
How I Would Like to Die: The Hanging Garden
My Soul’s Present Condition: Gold

If you are planning to get involved then let me know you in the comments below.

The Mountain by Drusilla Modjeska

Posted June 14, 2012 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Contemporary / 0 Comments

The Mountain by Drusilla ModjeskaTitle: The Mountain (Goodreads)
Author: Drusilla Modjeska
Published: Random House, 2012
Pages: 448
Genres: Contemporary
My Copy: Personal Copy

Before reading this book, I must admit that I’d never heard of Drusilla Modjeska so I thought I would look her up and find out a bit about this book before starting The Mountain. I would never have picked up this book if it wasn’t for the fact that I needed to read this book for my local bookclub. Yes, this was the same book club that made me read A Perfectly Good Man by Patrick Gale and The Hanging Garden by Patrick White so I was prepared not to enjoy, or even hate, this book. Modjeska is an award winning Australian author known for blurring the lines between Non-Fiction and Fiction. She has written three books in the past; Poppy (1990), The Orchard (1997) and Stravinsky’s Lunch (1999); all three books won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction.

The Mountain I believe was her first attempt at a purely fiction novel, but even this book has a lot of elements that might be considered non-fiction. I do like a book that uses real events and builds a story around them and I think Drusilla Modjeska did a decent job at doing just that. The first part of this book is a real coming of age story in Papua New Guinea during a time of colonialism. While there seemed to be a handful of characters this story covers (including Rika, Leonard, Jacob, Martha and Laedi) the books does a nice job of introducing each of the characters in this part of the book. The second part of the novel deals with a new generation who are dealing with the effects of everything that has happened. This generation is questioning their identity and the fallout of independence.

I really enjoyed learning more about Papua New Guinea’s history, featuring Whitlam government granting them independence and his dismissal. It was also nice to see the book revolving around other aspects of Papua New Guinea other than the Kokoda Track; which does feature but not in a huge way. Drusilla Modjeska took an interesting approach of making The Mountain the centre of this novel and almost took it to a point where she was making The Mountain a central character. This tactic helped drive the story a little for me; it was almost like the mountain has some secrets it didn’t want to tell.

I really wanted to enjoy this book more than I did but I felt the book ended up being too nice. While there are a lot of bad things happening during this book, the story itself felt too cutesy for me to enjoy properly. I think the characters were decent but I never felt like I knew them well enough to care about the struggles that they faced. I read this book right after reading another character driven book, The Red House by Mark Haddon, and I think Modjeska’s story was nice, but Haddon’s The Red House seemed to outshine The Mountain in terms of characters and exploring their personal struggles.

Monthly Review – May 2012

Posted May 31, 2012 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Monthly Reading / 0 Comments

What a great month we have had here at Literary Exploration. The site was officially launched on the 1st and we have been releasing a new post every one to two days. I really hope we can keep up this momentum and I’ve been working hard to get more and more content on the site for your enjoyment.  You might have noticed some older books being reviewed on the site as well as some new releases and ARCs. I hope you are enjoying the mixture of old and new as well as the different genres because we plan to read books and put up content of all types of books. We are proud to have a guest post up already as well as two books that I’m hoping people will enjoy when they are released in June.

On the forums on Goodreads we have been reading the classic detective novel; The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle. This was the first time I’ve ever read this book and I’m still trying to work out why it took me so long to read it. Next month we will be reading another classic novel, when we read the Victorian novel; The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. I hope you can join in the discussions on Goodreads and have your say on what books we will read in the future.

My reading has been going really well this month, from trying out my first book in the popular Harry Hole series, to the laughs of the weird things customers say in bookstores. Highlights for me included the Russian classic Crime and Punishment which may be a massive book; it was just a beautiful crime novel and a real joy to read. Talulla Rising by Glen Duncan which will be released on the 26th of June is an exciting follow up to The Last Werewolf; it’s dark, gritty, over sexed and I highly recommend it. As well as Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell and Drive by James Sallis which are both great crime novels.

May’s Books

 

The Red House by Mark Haddon

Posted May 18, 2012 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Literary Fiction / 0 Comments

The Red House by Mark HaddonTitle: The Red House (Goodreads)
Author: Mark Haddon
Published: Jonathan Cape, Random House, 2012
Pages: 272
Genres: Literary Fiction
My Copy: ARC from Publisher

Buy: Amazon (or visit your local Indie bookstore)

It’s hard to review a book like this; Mark Haddon is a very talented writer and he has some brilliant techniques employed into this novel. However, I can’t help comparing this book to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and ultimately I think this book lacked something to make this book great. With the huge success of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, I can’t help but think that Mark Haddon has gotten overly confident with his writing. While it was refreshing and enjoyable to read a book with so many interesting writing techniques; I never really connected with the plot or the characters. I was so excited about reading another book by this author and I feel I made a rookie mistake by going into a book with such high expectations.

The Red House is the story about a well off physician, Richard, and his new family (recently married a woman with a sixteen year old daughter) taking a vacation. Richard invites his sister Angela and family to join them as they hadn’t seen each other since the funeral of their mother, fifteen years ago. Angela’s husband Dominic and three children are not as well off as Richard and took advantage of the offer as they wouldn’t be able to afford a vacation any other way. Together for a week in a rented cottage in Wales starts to show the cracks in everyone’s relationship and exposes just how dysfunctional the family really is.

Mark Haddon is contently switching between narrators in this book, I think I counted eight different points of views throughout this book (might be more) and one of those was an all-seeing third person narrative. With the narrative always changing and each character only giving a glimpse of an insight, this book started off a little confusing and hard to keep track of all of the main characters. One thing I’ve found that Haddon did in this book as well as The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time that I really liked was that he wasn’t afraid to expose the inner voice of each character and allowing the reader an insight into the flaws and thoughts of each one of the characters. There were also a lot of references to pop-culture within this book that was quite enjoyable to read; especially all the references to each book the main characters were reading.

The Red House was actually a nice easy read and I was surprised how fast I got through this book; this could have been all the blank pages throughout the book. While I never really connected with this book the writing styles used throughout this book were interesting and almost experimental at times. Some of it worked and some of didn’t, I think Mark Haddon was overly confident when he wrote this book and it seemed to come through in the novel. I’m sure many people will love and enjoy this book and don’t let my opinion stop you from reading it. For me I struggled making that connection and I tried and tried to enjoy this book but it just didn’t quite get there.