Sofa Spotlight - The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

This has been on my list as a book that I felt I should read, rather than one I wanted to read. I’d seen the film a few years ago and wasn’t that fussed about it, but thought that maybe the book was better. Turns out that if I hadn’t seen the film I would have had a problem understanding what was happening in the book.

It won’t come as a surprise to learn that the plot follows the fortunes of a character called Gatsby. Gatsby throws outlandish parties in the hope that Daisy, who he was in love with but couldn’t marry, will come. Thing is Daisy is now married, but that doesn’t stop Gatsby from being obsessed with her. And eventually things go pear shaped.

My biggest problem was finding a character that I could get behind. None of them were likeable and some of them, like Daisy’s husband, I really didn’t like. When the book came to an end I wasn’t left with a great impression. If anything I was glad it was over as it had been hard work to get to the end. Not one I would recommend, but maybe I’m missing its significance. Either way it’s ticked off my list.

Sofa Spotlight - The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead

Last week I talked about how I felt Furious Hours by Casey Cep was one of the best books I read last year. Nickel Boys is also a strong contender. It is a fictionalised account of what happened in a real school in the states. 

Nickel is the name of the Nickel Academy, a reform school for boys, and the story follows Elwood Curtis who is a black teenager growing up in the 1960s. An innocent mistake leaves him as a pupil at the Nickel Academy and we see the horrors through his eyes. 

There is a grittiness to this book that is hard to come to terms with. The subject is handled well, and doesn’t dwell on graphic details, but in no way does it downplay the brutality of what happened. 

I was taken by surprise by the way the book ended, but that was one of the features that made this such an impactful read. I highly recommend it but it’s not for the fainthearted. 

Sofa Spotlight - Furious Hours, Casey Cep

One for you if you are a fan of either Harper Lee or In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. I think this is possibly one of the best non fiction books I read last year and I’m not alone in that opinion. Really you could split this book in two. 

Part of it deals with the murder of The Reverend. The Reverend being Rev Willie Maxwell, a suspected serial killer in Alabama, who was shot at the funeral of what may have been one of his victims. The second serves almost  as a biography of Harper Lee and focuses in on her investigation of Maxwell. 

Harper Lee’s involvement in the research needed for Truman Capote’s book In Cold Blood, also comes under scrutiny. And it essential for understanding why she may have been working on a manuscript for a book about Willie Maxwell. Certainly Cep makes a valid case for parts of the book having been written, but sadly it’s one of those things we may never know for sure. 

I read To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time last year and fell in love with it. Needless to say I was eager to get my hands on this book and I wasn’t disappointed at all. Casey Cep makes this an exciting and very readable tale. If you didn’t catch it last year, make sure you do this year. 

Sofa Spotlight - The Key to the Half Words, Andrew Chaplin

Very glad for the recommendation of this one. I have to admit that I wasn’t overly sure what I was getting myself into when I picked it up and it took a couple of chapters for me to get into it. But once I had got my head around a genre I don’t often encounter I found myself enjoying it. 

As I read I felt there was a heavy influence of Tolkien on the narrative. The plot line follows the adventures of two boys who live on one side of a divide. There was once one world occupied by both humans and mythical creatures. Only mythical creatures are not mythical in this book they just live on the other side of the divide. Our heroes fall through a gap and find themselves in the other half world, where they help wizard Toby in his efforts to stop an evil queen.

So not just seeing the influence of Tolkien but also of C. S. Lewis. Having said that, the story is unique and stands apart from both these authors. For one thing it addresses issues pertinent to today that neither Lewis or Tolkien would have had knowledge of. Whether Chaplin intended his work to be a metaphor or not, its possible to read into it about how divided our own world is and how those divisions can be overcome, if dealt with gently and kindly, or exploited with disastrous consequences. 

So yes my recommendation is, check this book out!

What I Read This Year

Here be the list of all that I got through this year:

The Boy from the Snow - Maria Johnson

As Kingfishers Catch Fire - Eugene Peterson

Follow me Back - Nicci Cloke

Shoot Your Shot - Vernon Brundage Jr

Ronaldo: The Phantom Carrot Snatcher - Maxine Sylvester 

The Tattooist of Auschwitz - Heather Morris

Racing Through the Dark - David Millar

Rob Roy - Walter Scott

A Journey of Three Degrees - A L Kent

A Life’s Ambition - Alexandre Dumas

Mortom - Erik Therme

The Journal of Madame Giovanni - Alexandre Dumas

The Prince of Thieves - Alexandre Dumas

The Neapolitan Lovers - Alexandre Dumas

A Dark Night’s Work - Elizabeth Gaskell

Extinction of All Children - L J Epps

Le Tour: A History of the Tour de France - Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Dewey - Vicky Myron

The French Revolution and what went Wrong - Stephen Clarke

The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins

Broken Sky - L A Weatherly

To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee

A Stranger in the House - Shari Lapena

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

The Gulag Archipelago - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 

The Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank

Defiance - Jason Krumbine

Related by Blood - Holly Sheidenberger 

Darkness Follows - L A Weatherly

Everyday Church - Tim Chester & Steve Timmis

The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill - James Charlesworth

Zeal Without Burnout - Christopher Ash

The Essex Serpent - Sarah Perry

The Shadow Doctor - Adrian Plass

Lock Every Door - Riley Sager

Who on Earth is the Holy Spirit - Tim Chester & Christopher de la Hayden

1984 - George Orwell

The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Night - Elie Wiesel

Sofa Spotlight - Night, Elie Wiesel

It isn’t a Christmassy book to be finishing on but as it was the shortest day over the weekend it kind of fits. As well as that, it finishes off a year of reading that has unintentionally involved many books on the Holocaust or concentration camps. So what’s one more.

I’m not sure you can rate books like this against each other, but because of its length I would probably be inclined to recommend this one over the others. It is also readable and poignant beyond what words can describe.

The writer of the book shares his experiences of his time at Auschwitz. His arrival there is towards the end of the war and on his arrival prisoners are shocked that the new inmates have allowed themselves to be brought there. They had known, or at least heard rumours of what was happening to the Jews so why had they not already fled to safety. Wiesel describes his experiences of the concentration camp and also his struggle to reconcile what was happening to him and others with the God that he had been brought up to know. 

Like I say it’s not a long read, but it is certainly a powerful one that provides much food for thought. 

Sofa Spotlight - The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I don’t know about you but sometimes there are books out there that you know you should read but somehow you never get around to it. For me this was one of those books. And given how short a book it is there was no excuse at all! Short as it might be, there is some serious power in its pages.

The story follows a crashed pilot who has landed in the desert. There he meets the little prince who is visiting Earth from another planet. He tells the pilot his story, about the planet he is from and the other planets he has visited on his journey. From each part of his journey come lessons that can be drawn from the threads of the lessons that the little prince is also learning. 

I loved this book. It was over far too soon and I was so sorry to see the little prince go. He has been one of the hardest characters to say goodbye to when a book is finished. So if you’ve never read this, take an afternoon over Christmas and open it up and enjoy it. I’m certain that you won’t regret it. Although the question I’m left with right now is, how did I never hear of this book when I was a child?