Photography books

First up was Vietnam by Larry Burrows. Burrows was a photographer for Life magazine and covered the war in Vietnam from 1962 until his death in a helicopter crash there in 1971. His photographs have an immediacy which draw you right in. Some of them have a huge emotional impact, the kind which hits you with a shock of feeling giving you a lurch in the stomach. The first of these is the frontispiece which has no text but speaks for itself. Three soldiers are pictured but what is horrifying is that they look like young teenagers. One still has his baby-faced features, even though presumably he must be at least 18. This photograph brings home the youth of the soldiers more than any statistics about average age. Many of them weren't men, they were boys. Another photograph had a particular impact for me. It was a shot of the marines landing at Da Nang to defend the airport, early in the war. I had a jolt of recognition as I realised that these were "my" marines, the ones I had just been reading about in Philip Caputo's Rumor of War.

Of a completely different nature was Diary of a Century by Jacques Henri Lartigue. This is a charming book, illustrated by photographs taken by Lartigue right from the time when he was given a camera as a small boy about 1900. When you think of photographs from around this time you normally think of them as being stiff and posed, but Lartigue took action photographs of his mischievous brothers and cousins as they leapt down steps, plunged into pools and raced carts. Lartigue was fortunate to come from a wealthy family with a country house outside Paris, as well as having supportive (and brave!) parents who encouraged the boys in their various pursuits such as building and trying to fly gliders. However as the later photographs show no one is immune to tragedy in their life. The photographs continue right through 2 world wars to the end of Lartigue's life.

Slang of the Day

Looks like my little Slang of the Day box is running out of slang ... today it is telling us about the importance of voting! Stoppit, Slang of the Day! I signed up for new slang words, not lectures!

Duma Key by Stephen King

Another whopper from Stephen King - 670 odd pages which took me from Friday night to Sunday afternoon so way over my book-a-day rate. Stephen King is an excellent author, although personally I would prefer more psychological stuff and less horror (my favourites of his are Stand by Me and The Shawshank Redemption).. This book grips you right from the start and really keeps you turning those pages as mysteries are set up and then gradually explained ... however as is usual with King I felt the story could have been wrapped up sooner.

Next I turned to non-fiction and my all-time favourite on prose writing, Stunk and White's Elements of Style. This is a little book of under 100 pages which is so well-written that you can read its rules on grammar and punctuation for pleasure! Keep it on your reference shelf and dip into it again and again.

Then I returned to Carsley in the Cotswolds with Agatha Raisin for "Agatha Raisin and the Wellspring of Death". Fortunately for us, Agatha is now back in the Cotswolds with the familiar cast of characters and with another murder to solve. Fortunately for me, I still have lots of this series left to read.

A miscalculation!

It looks like I am two books short! It's been 21 days since I started and I've only read 19 ... that's what comes of reading a book over 24 hours rather than during one complete day. I'd better catch up now rather than later!

Back on track

I finished A Rumor of War today. I wasn't expecting the way the author's military career ended at all. You will have to read it yourselves to find out what happened to him.

Last night I fitted in a nice short Agatha Raisin story - Agatha Raisin and the Terrible Tourist. For the first time Agatha is out of the Cotswolds and on holiday in Northern Cyprus. M C Beaton makes the country and its residents sound very attractive and well worth a visit, although she does overdo the touristy descriptions a bit (as does Agatha!) Funnily enough the back cover describes Agatha as a Miss Marple, but I can't remember Miss Marple ever sleeping with anybody *shudders* ... Agatha is as feisty and as funny as usual, but I will be glad to see her back home in Carsley in the next novel.

In which your beloved narrator falls behind

Last night's book was A Rumor of War by Philip Caputo. This is a memoir of the Vietnam War, written by a graduate student who joined the Marines before the days of the draft. At first I thought this book must have been the source of the film Platoon, but then I found out that was based on the director Oliver Stone's own experiences. The similarities of themes and incidents must simply be due to the two men having similar backgrounds and to the now-archetypal motifs of that particular war. Caputo is a skilled writer (he later became a prizewinning journalist) and what comes across is his essential humanity even as he maintains that he is becoming de-humanized by the war.

I didn't leave myself enough time to read this however, so will have to catch up on it over the next few days, particularly as I came back from lunch with my friend Jo clutching a pile of Agatha Raisin books by M C Beaton. More on those later!

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

I knew this was written in an invented slang (which apparently includes words from Russian and from Cockney rhyming slang). I worried if it would be too difficult to read but it doesn't take long to get into the way of it, helped by the author who usually places words in context or even gives their meaning, and of course the words are used repeatedly. You can tell quite easily, for example, that Alex's droogs are his mates.

Alex is the anti-hero of the work. His morals are lower than a snake's belly, and the violence he uncaringly perpetrates is quite sickening. He is also the architect of his own downfall, in a classic case of hubris. You do start to feel sorry for him though as he is used and abused by the authorities. In a redeeming feature, he declaims in a cool Shakespearean style and is also rather witty! He is plainly more intelligent than his droogs, but sadly for him, not as intelligent as he thinks he is.

This is another one of those books where you wonder what really happened next. It's a classic which is well worth reading not so much for its vision of a dystopian future but simply as a really good story.