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I’m a bad, bad person and have once again let myself slide. I am going to blame it on work and that is partially true, I did have a pretty busy month, October, but I will also accept that I have allowed a pile of books to go unreviewed. This would probably not look so bad if I have not accidentally discovered that I had let a couple of jewels get swept under the rug. How? Don’t ask me, but now I go from one review, to five reviews. So really, I was not behind, I was almost on schedule, until I found a crap load of books that I had forgotten about, so the other part of this I am blaming on the past.

Not sure how that works either, but I don’t really care. Let’s talk about books:

Title: The Beach
Author: Alex Garland
Category: Fiction - Adventure

I credit a small handful of authors for getting me back into reading. Neil Gaiman is one of them, Mark Z. Danielewski would be another and we could probably toss Chuck Palahniuk and Kurt Vonnegut into the mix for good measure, but Alex Garland is another definite. Before Neverwhere, before American Gods, before House of Leaves…I read The Beach.

I am having a difficult time remembering the specifics, but I was on a trip somewhere, maybe back to Wa. State to visit an old friend and I read an article on some magazine (again, details escape me, sue me, I am not a freakin’ elephant), regarding some new hot shot that had written a hell of a debut and the guy was younger than me. So I looked it up and bought it at the air port. I am a slow reader, so I can not brag that I had it read by the time I got off the plane, but I really wanted to! That counts for something.

The story is that of an British kid, fed up with what he feels is the over crowding of civilization, looking for that one thrilling experience that will separate him from the herd, the one story that will make his youth worthwhile. He finds said thrill in the form of a hand drawn map given to him by a man who calls himself Duffy Duck, a man who is found dead a day later in the seedy hotel in which Richard is staying. Richard being the British kid. The map? It is the promise of paradise on earth, a secret carefully guarded, a beach untouched by civilization rumored to be beyond beauty.

On a whim, Richard decides to believe it and take with him two neighboring French kids that are there in Thailand, for similar reasons. It of course helps that one of those French kids, is Francoise, who is both beautiful and unattainable (she is with Etienne, the other French kid). So they go, but on a drunken night, just before departure, Richard redraws the map for another group of kids, thinking nothing of it.

Richard, Francoise and Etienne find their beach…unfortunately things are not entirely perfect and when others begin to show up and the secret seems to be ruined, the stakes raise much higher than anybody could have imagined.

If I sound over excited about this book, that is because I am. It is difficult for me to contain myself when talking about it. I ended up reading everything else that had Garland’s name on it afterwards and I do not regret a single minute of it. I still recommend this book to most people I meet and I will recommend it to you. The Beach, go get it.

Rating: 5 out of 5

Title: Dracula
Author: Bram Stoker
Genre: Fiction - Horror

Bram Stoker’s classic, I do not know that you really need me to tell you what this is about, because anybody that has not heard of this book has most likely been living under a rock (my apologies to those of you that have not heard of this book, but really…get out a little). Vampires, horror, classic literature, I hardly need to say more. But I will because as is often the case with classics, it takes a bit of patience to sink your teeth into. Books, like film, have changed over time. The pacing is different, language is different, story arcs are different and that means adjustment from the part of the reader.

It took me three tries to actually get into this book. First it was recommended to me by my swim coach (Amy, not Jay, this is when I was still a tot), but the combination of a difficult read, with my lack of knowledge of the language had me giving up pretty early in. I tried again later in high school, but I was in that mentality where…I had better things to do, like going out on Friday nights and do nothing with groups of friends. So it was not until I got into the swing of reading and prior to Halloween last year that I finally picked it up. This time I was able to appreciate it for what it was and I do not have to say it was engrossing.

I also ought to comment on the edition that I got, which is actually called The Illustrated Dracula, which is the same story as pretty much any edition you get, but comes coupled with some illustrations by Jae Lee which are pretty damn amazing. Kinda like frosting on your cake. Really good frosting. So if pictures help keep you intruiged, then this version is for you. If you could care less about pictures, there are a lot of other editions that could save you a couple of bucks. Either way, the read is the same and it is a good one!

Rating: 5 out of 5

Title: The Master and Margarita
Author: Mikhail Bulgakov
Category: Fiction

I did not forget to review this book because it was not memorable. Quite the contrary, actually, which may sound a bit strange but it actually makes sense. This book was so different to my average read that I really had to digest it to better understand where I stood on it. A lot about this is unorthodox, starting with the fact that the book was actually banned in Russia for a good number of years, or the fact that neither The Master, nor Margarita, are really main characters in this story. In like fashion, this story unfolds in ways that are hard to predict and so for the longest time I had to wonder if I enjoyed the breaking of the mold or if it was throwing me off. I decided I liked it…a lot…but apparently forgot to let you guys know. So here it is now.

The devil came to Moscow, and he did not arrive alone. He, is a charming, gentleman with mismatched eyes, with a gift for trickery (no duh!) and a self-proclaimed master of Black Magic, who goes by the name of Woland. With him are a vodka-drinking, black cat who occasionally wears clothes and always walks on two legs named Behemoth; a ‘translator’ and former ‘choir-master’ who is dressed in near rags and a cracked pince-nez, wielding a certain charm of his own and named Koroviev (among other things); a red haired, stocky, fanged hitman named Azazel; and a beautifully witch with a tendency to walk around naked, named Hella. Needless to say, all sorts of hell (no pun intended) breaks loose when Satan lands in Moscow, often results that are as hilarious as they are troubling.

Add to the mix a writer that has given up on himself after writing a magnificent story about Pontious Pilate, a man who goes by the name of The Master, who in the passing of time won himself the heart of a woman named Margarita. When the work is destroyed and The Master is in the brink of insanity, Margarita is willing to risk it all to save him and his writing. But with the devil around, things are simply not that easy.

The fact that this book was banned points to the fact that the government did not like it. And from the on-set one can tell the author is taking cracks the Stalinist regime and social conditions of Russia during the 30’s. But there is much more to this book, which mixes politics, religion and entertainment, breaking every rule to bring us a very memorable, very entertaining, very clever book that everybody ought to own a copy of. Guaranteed to provoke thought and laughter, this is a book I will recommend to the avid reader, though perhaps not to the ones that like their stories more neatly packaged. There is nothing neat about this book.

Rating: 5 out of 5

Title: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Author: Hunter S. Thompson
Category: Fiction - Semi-auto-biographical?

If you have not yet read the book, you most likely have watched the Johnny Depp vehicle that bears the same name and which is largely very accurate to the book, bringing for your entertainment a twisted, drug enduced hallucination for you to either devour or reject. The book is the same, but better and more in depth, as most books tend to be when compared to the movies based off them. The feeling and the mood, will remain, however, unchanged and if you had a hard time watching, you will probably not enjoy the book either.

Vulgar, politically incorrect and all sorts of funny, Hunter S. Thompson describes his journey to Las Vegas to find the American Dream and while he is at it try to pay the bills, that is if he is able to keep himself alive after taking pretty much every drug known to man kind and after running into trouble with just about everybody he meets. Lucky for him, he has his good for nothing attorney at his side, who is just as much under the influence as our dear narrator is.

The trip, literally and figuratively, starts from the get-go and never, ever, lets up, providing with one of the most interesting, off the wall, reads I have had since Naked Lunch. It is a short read, so there you can say the investment of time is not going to be much and I can guarantee you that if you do not like the first five pages, you are not going to like the entire book. So grab it at the book store, sit down with it for fifteen minutes and if you do not like what you are reading…then don’t buy it. If you do, it only gets worse…much much worse, and you can only shake your head and smile about it.

“People, as your attorney, I advice you all to check this book out.”

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Title: Kafka on the Shore
Author: Haruki Murakami
Category: Fiction

Blending David Mitchell-esque story telling with a touch of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s magical realism for spice, Murakami writes an interesting story about a boy, self-named Kafka, who is running away from home, from all he knows and from an Oedipal prophecy made by his father, which basically says that young Kafka will kill his own father at the age of fifteen and sleep with both his mother and his sister, whom he has not seen since he was a toddler.

Determined not to carry out this curse, Kafka runs away with a pocketful of cash, a pocket knife, a backpack and a lot of determination, having no particular destiny in mind. It is a story presented to us in first person, which takes us through the journey as Kafka makes some interesting acquaintances and goes into hiding, first for one reason, then for another. That takes care of the odd chapters, meanwhile, a secondary story is brought up on the even chapters, which runs parallel to the first and which is written in third-person perspective, having to do with a senior named Nakata, with a mental disability, who is able to talk to cats and make fish fall out of the sky. The latter is trying to escape his father, possibly looking for his mother and sister, while the former is simply trying to find a cat, a duty that ends up leading him through an unexpected journey that begins to pull into its net complete, unsuspecting strangers. How the two are realated, Nakata and Kafka…well that is part of the fun in trying to figure it out.

Labeled by some critics as a ‘mind-bending, metaphysical story’, Kafka on the shore blends pop culture, music and some interesting theories to put together quite a good tale. Though I will have to say, at moments the characters are so full of…instinctual knowledge, that I found myself pulling back at times and remembering this was a story. It is interesting, it is very much worth the read, but in my humble opinion, it is not perfect, nevertheless, the puzzle itself is alternatively humorous, interesting and creepy enough, that the read never lets up until the end and while I found it difficult to truly relate to the characters, in its own detached way, the story is still a very good one.

Rating: 4 out of 5

And that, finally, brings me up to date in all my reading. Next up? Kafka…the real one. Obviously, reading a book with Kafka on the title made me itchy to go for something considered more classic…and that is proving to be an interesting experience. More on that later.