The Booker and Sunshine Awards

Rosalind Adam and Mina Lobo have both paased the Booker Award to me. I now get to tell you about my favourite books...

This won't be a shock, because I often talk about my favourite books, but here goes...

Pride and Prejudice - Admit it, you didn't expect that one, did you?

Diary by Chuck Palanhuick - It's one of those books I just keep going back and re-reading. A woman is trapped in a loveless marriage, with a child that doesn't seem to like her much, and an overbearing mother-in-law. Seems quite a normal literary situation, doesn't it? But all is not what it seems!

The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom - This is a very happy and uplifting book, which gives a new take on Heaven. At the end, I just felt really happy and uplifted!

The Rendezvous and Other Stories by Daphne du Maurier - I'm not keen on her novels, but her short stories are divine and beautiful, rich and fulfilling... in fact everything I'd like to be as a writer.

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak - Read it, if you haven't done already... just read it. A great story, a great way of really understanding the plight of Jews during Nazi Germany.

Next Rebecca Bradley has awarded me the Sunshine Award. I've been given this one before, so I'm not going to answer the questions - sorry Rebecca, but thank you for thinking of me. You'll recognise Rebecca's name from my last post, so if you haven't visited her yet, now's your chance!

You'll also notice I haven't, as usual, passed either of these awards on to anyone else. If you'd like to tell me about your favourite books, I'd love to read about them. And everyone deserves the Sunshine Award because your blogs cheer me up. Yes, I'm talking to you right now!

C is for Chuck Palahniuk

 I heard about Chuck Palahniuk after watching Fight Club. I thought it was a good film with great actors; and a fantastic twist!

I discovered Fight Club was actually a book, so off I went in search, and I was hooked on the style, on the shape and form of the prose - and the much more realistic ending. Then I discovered that Fight Club wasn't actually his best book. I've read Invisible Monsters and Haunted (which I never completed - trying far too hard to be gory and becoming a parody of himself, sadly), but my absolute favourite is Diary.

Haunted, incidentally, is the novel that caused several men to faint at a reading as Palahniuk gave a graphic account of some damage to the male anatomy.
 

Chuck Palahniuk's Goodreads page

Diary is about a woman who always wanted to be an artist but never thought of herself as any good. She got married, had a daughter, acquired a pushy mother-in-law, and then her husband ends up in hospital in a coma. The flashbacks are really well-handled, in that they don't glare off the page, they flow with the rest of the story.

The plot jumps along at quite a pace, and I must admit, the idea of a man in a coma for the whole novel inspired a character in my latest novel MS. It also - much to my dismay, because I'm not sure how to recitfy it - leant itself to the tone of half of my novel, until a point where Palahniuk's voice fades out and mine appears. One of my betas who knows me very well actually noticed the change of voice, so I know it's obvious, and I know I can't attempt to sell a novel that's half written in someone else's voice. Especially a voice as obvious as Palahniuk's. But because it's so strong, and because it lends itself so well to that part of the novel I can't even re-write the first sentence - it's just so perfect the way it is!

I would add that if you're going to check him out on my recommendation, go for some earlier stuff. The repeated hooks - almost refrains - that I thought worked well in Fight Club and Diary are used to excess later on. Maybe he thought because it worked in a couple of novels it would work in them all! Actually, I may have more mixed feelings about Palahniuk than I thought!

My aim of this post wasn't to advertise, but coincidentally...
C is also for Cat and the Dreamer, my new novella.
Please feel free to check out the links on the top of the left-hand column :-)
Thank you!

Cheers, Chuck!

For the past two weeks or so, I've been scribbling in a notebook: full scenes, short sentences, random things that people might say, character traits.... and so on. It's been liberating and fun, and best of all they all relate to the same story. All these scenes etc have now been attributed to just five very flawed characters and a rather sinister plotline.

Unfortunately, the main bulk of this was written when I was reading Diary by Chuck Palahniuk who I've mentioned a couple of time before on this blog. The problem is, his style is infectious. Granted, it got me writing with abandon, but in his voice; so now as I start to move the words from the notebook to my computer, I have to edit Chuck out and put me in.

Sometimes I feel I just make work for myself!

Books I wish I'd written

Inspiration seems to have frozen as deeply as the weather outside, so I thought I would share a few of the books I wish I'd written (which are also some of my favourite books, so also take this list as books I recommend).

Fight Club by Chuck Palanhuick - Obviously this book was made into that film with the gorgeous Brad Pitt and incredibly talented Ed Norton. I first read the book after I watched the film, and I believe it's better. The ending makes so much more sense in the book! The prose is highly stylized and rhythmic, with the kind of repetition of words and ideas that I sometimes employ myself. It's a joy to read and very satisfying when you reach the end.

The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom - I've mentioned this book in other posts and also, I think, on Facebook. It's a very happy and uplifting book, which gives a new take on Heaven. The main character is a lovely old man who doesn't feel he's achieved his life's ambitions due to outisde influences such as WWII.  I'm not sure I can say much more about this book, but I highly recommend this book. I should also mention that I bought this book entirely based on the title, which makes me realise how important titles really are.

Quite Contrary by Suzannah Dunn - I found this book in a discount book shop just after I'd read an article about it where the author mentioned it was only 56,000 words long. I bought it because of its length basically, but the writing is so rounded and believable, and the dialogue rings very true.

Snake by Kate Jennings - Set in the Australian outback it charts the life of a dissatisfied couple. Again, I picked this book up because it's very short, some of the chapters are barely two or three paragraphs long, and it's good for me to know that there are some publishers who are willing to take risks with prose. Kate Jennings is a poet, first and foremost, and you can definitely tell by reading this novel. The writing flows so well and so powerfully, so many emotions are shaped with so few words.

I need something by Margaret Atwood on this list, so I'm going to chose The Robber Bride. I think this was the first Margaret Atwood book I read, then I worked backwards. Whenever I read her, I mimic her style, which is long and descriptive and flowing and veers off in so many tangents. My style mimicking her style works very badly, but it's a lesson for me in how to write more expansively. In The Robber Bride, for example, she has a character who likes to reverse her words and sentences (if I remember correctly, it's been a while since I read it) - which is a perfect devise for writing everything out twice and doubling the word count!!!!

And lastly, Paradise by Toni Morrison - I was surprised to enjoy this book, because at school I read Beloved, and found it very difficult to get past the first page without being totally confused; there was just something very peculiar about the prose that didn't agree with me. Paradise, on the other hand, did everything I love about reading about foreign countries - it toally immersed me and made even the most mundane things about daily Deep South life seem exotic. Whenever I read it I always embark on an exercise to make South East Cornwall seem exotic - I haven't achieved it yet.

That's my list. I hope you search out a couple of these, or perhaps share your favourite books with me.