Tuesday 19 March 2019

Review: The End of Mr Y, by Scarlett Thomas

This has been on my bookshelf for years and for some reason, I kept putting it aside, or picking it up and beginning it before misplacing it for ages.

Last week, I finally picked it up again and determined to finish it.

Ariel, the main character, is a recently-started PhD student with a focus on literature and 'thought experiments'. However, her supervisor mysteriously disappears, and, on the day the book begins, a building close to Ariel's university building collapses.

On her way home, she stops in a second hand bookshop and cannot believe her eyes when she finds a rare copy of "The End of Mr Y", a book that is said to be cursed. She reads it, and it's about a scientist who meets a travelling magician, who shows him that it is possible to enter a dimension called the Troposphere and inhabit other people's minds.

Ariel, curious about the fiction/reality of the story, finds the recipe for the mixture used to enter this world, but then the trouble begins. Two men, decommissioned from the CIA, find her, desperate to find the recipe so they can sell it on the black market.

In between the high stakes of Ariel's escape from the clutches of these men are discussions of philosophy, exploration into love (which Ariel has never experienced), the freedoms and pitfalls of casual sex, and the ethics of changing History when given the opportunity. As far as entering the Troposphere goes, think "Inception" with the ability to inhabit other minds thrown in.

It's a story full of originality, thought-provoking discussions, humour and heartbreak. 

Wednesday 6 March 2019

Review: The Point of Poetry, Joe Nutt

Note: I exchanged a free copy of this book in exchange for review.

I learned a new word as a result of this book - metrophobia, or the fear of poetry. As Joe Nutt hypothesises, most fear of poetry comes from a simple lack of understanding of poetry itself, or the point of it. The current way of teaching about it in secondary schools can also be a contributing factor - my own memory of learning about poetry at secondary school, (although it vastly improved at A Level as a result of my fantastic teacher), is simply analysing line by line, looking for poetic techniques to PEE (point, evidence, explain) to death, rather than looking at it holistically and most importantly, placing it in context.

What Joe Nutt is basically present what poetry teaching at school should look like, right down to not even putting the poem of each chapter at the beginning - they are, very deliberately, placed at the end. What this allows the reader to do is understand the context of the poem, a bit about the poet's life, and links to aspects of other poets and the culture of the time. Thus, by the time you get to the poem itself, you're more armed, so to speak, to fully enjoy the poem and also be able to technically read it better (e.g. The Prelude by Wordsworth).

Nutt's love and passion for poetry bleeds from the pages. I'd never disliked poetry as such, but I wouldn't really picture myself sitting down and reading and thinking about a book of poems, rather than a novel. This book has changed that for me. For example, I picked up a copy of Paradise Lost from my bookshelf, took a quick scan, and thought that I would never be able to make it through. The last chapter of Nutt's book has shown me that I can, although it would be wiser to take it in small chunks.

There were some things that Nutt said that I found myself disagreeing on, (see the part about 'safe spaces' at universities, as I think the whole concept has been unhelpfully trivialised), but for the most part, I connected to what he was saying, not just about the poems but the politics and culture that go along with it.

If you never got along with poetry at school, this is definitely a book to get you back into it. And for those who love poetry, anyway, this book will just be like a good conversation with an old friend.