Book Review: The Humans by Matt Haig

The Humans by Matt Haig takes a fun, irreverent look at the human species, our appearances and way of life.  The novel revolves around the narration of an alien species called the Vonnadorians, in the form of a report to his superiors.

The author did not tell the readers what the alien looked like, but from the alien's horrified reporting of humans, one can allude that Vonnadorians most likely resemble a round ball with huge eyes. "Their faces alone contain all manner of curiosities. A primitive external auditory organs known as ears, tiny eyes and unfathomably pointless eyebrows." It went on to describe the "primitivenesss" of having external limbs, and the unfathomableness of the law requiring the human species to wear odd things called clothes.

This description of humans resonated with me as I had, between 2008 and 2010, written another blog from the perspective of my cats. I had wondered what my cats thought of us changing our clothes all the time, our activities, our going-in and going-out of the house and coming home with bags of groceries or new household items. So, from my cats' point of view, we were constantly changing our skins, we sometimes hanged our skins on coat hooks, put them into a square looking contraption that washed and tumbled-dried our skins and we went out to hunt for food at fixed hours daily, but were only successful at weekends.

But I digressed. Back to the novel, the nameless alien was placed on earth to take the place of a brilliant mathematical professor, Andrew Martin. It was hinted that the said professor was abducted and killed by the Vonnadorians for a breakthrough mathematical discovery that would threaten the universe.

The narrator alien's job was to find out who Andrew Martin had revealed the mathematical evidence to, assassinate those who knew, and destroy the evidence.

 

Book Review: The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

In life, there are many choices, and within a choice, there are many other choices. It is like a tree with many branches within a branch, or a road with many forks within a fork. 

Once you have made a choice, do not look back with regret at the choices you hadn't made. Instead, make the best of it, without any expectations. For without expectations, you will have no disappointment. And without any disappointment or regret, you will have no depression. 

That is the lesson I took away from The Midnight Library. No expectation = no disappointment or regret = no depression.

In the book, Nora Seed was very depressed, she regretted all the choices she hadn't made as well as the ones she had made. Her life was not what she had expected it to be and she felt she could not do anything right, not even a simple thing like caring for her cat. She wanted to end her life.

In between life and death, she came upon a library. Within that library, the shelves of books went on forever. Each book contained a life that could have been hers had she made that choice. If she found a life that she liked, she could stay in that life. If she didn't like it, she would be transported back to the library to choose another life.

In that suspended state, Nora lived various different lives, trying them out to see if she would like to live one of them. And in doing that, she began to appreciate her original life. It is the book to go to if we ever need to be reminded to be content and happy with our choices and what we have.

Book Review: Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

 

Outlander was first published in 1991 but I only came to know of it recently when a friend recommended the book. It is the first in the Outlander book and TV series.

Outlander is a story about time-travel romance between Claire Randall and Jamie Fraser. Claire is a military nurse who served in the World War II. When the war ended in 1945 she reunited with her husband Frank. They had married shortly before war broke out, and were separated for six years. They decided to take a second honeymoon in a village in Scotland where they were married.

It was in that village, up on a hill, where Claire was suddenly transported back in time to 18th century Scotland. There, she met and married Jamie Fraser.

That is the first issue I have with the book. Call it what you want, bigamy is still bigamy regardless of the time period. You can't argue that two hundred years ago Claire wasn't married yet. That argument is not valid because Claire wasn't even born yet at that time. However, the married Claire from year 1945 was the same person who married a second man while still being married. 

My second objection is the relationship between Claire and Jamie. Jamie is a guy who would be arrested and jailed today for domestic violence. But in the book, it was "normal" for a husband to beat his wife, and then get turned on by the beating and raped her. That is one SICK man, to say it's a normal in the 18th century is just a very poor excuse to glamourize domestic violence. 

My third grouse is that Frank, the legal husband, was not given more story-time. He was a gentle, affectionate History professor. I much preferred his personality to that of Jamie Fraser. But because the book was told only from Claire's point of view, there was no mention of a possibly distraught Frank searching for Claire. I wish the author had done a multiple points of view, I would have loved to know what went on in Frank's mind as he searched fruitlessly for Claire, and how the villagers took the disappearance of her, especially Mrs Baird, the nosy proprietor of the bed and breakfast where Claire and Frank stayed at.

Book Review: Micro by Michael Crichton & Richard Preston

Micro, a nano-technology thriller, was one-third written when Michael Crichton died. His agent looked for a co-writer to finish the novel based on Crichton's notes , files and two drawn maps. Richard Preston was eventually selected to complete the novel, based on his science background and bioterrorism work. The book was published in November 2011. 

Micro was set in the rainforest of Hawaii and features a villainous entrepreneur and Harvard graduate students shrunk to half an inch tall (though the scientists in the novel referred to them as dimensionally changed). Small insects like ants saw them as food. Added to that mix were micro-robots programmed to kill. Think Honey, I Shrunk The KIds and miniature Jurassic Park.

The plot opened with a private investigator being hired to check out the nanotechnology organization which resulted in three mysterious deaths in an office, one of them being the private investigator himself. The police was baffled, as the only clues were ultra-fine, sharp razor cuts all over their bodies. The doors and windows to the office were locked from within and there were no signs of struggles of any kind. They just plopped down dead. Period.

Besides the action-packed story, the novel also contained a lot of rich details on the flora and fauna, insect life and their anatomy and biotechnology. One of the characters, Rick Hutter, an ethnobotanist, reminded me of my late grandmother. He believed that you could fight venom with venom. My late grandmother would catch centipedes and pickled them in vinegar, or was it wine, I don't remember. I was just a young kid then. Each centipede that crawled in our garden was perceived as priceless treasure and would be carefully picked up with a pair of tweezer before being lowered into a jar of vinegar/wine. She said the venom of the centipede would counteract the venom of a snake bite.   

But I digress....anyway, this novel educates as well as entertains. I was hooked right from the beginning and finished the 424-pages book in one and a half days (read: no productive work was done during that period).

Book Review: 11.22.63 by Stephen King

This is Stephen King's first attempt at a time travel piece, even though the idea for 11.22.63 came to him in 1971. King said that "back then, the wound was still raw and it would require too much research and literary talent" that he didn't think he had. When he returned to the project later, King had to read a lot of historical documents and archives in preparation for the novel. He even found out how much drinks and food cost at that time.

11.22.63 centres on Jake Epping, a high school English teacher at Lisbon Falls, Maine, who travelled back in time to try to prevent the assassination of JKF. The time bubble was at the back pantry of a diner. And the time in the past was 9 September, 1958 at 11:58am, Lisbon Falls, Maine. 

In order to prevent the assassination, Jake would have to stay in the past for four years. And the past is obdurate. It refused to be changed, and would do anything to prevent Jake from changing it. 

The concept was fascinating but somehow, the plot did not hold me in its grip. There wasn't enough tension or action and it was one of the few Stephen King novels that I was able to put down to attend to other things. It wasn't a poorly written novel. But it wasn't one of his better ones either. 

That said, anybody who enjoys reading as a pastime should try to lay their hands on a copy. There's a lot of interesting trivial data, like how women in that era were different from today's women. 

Book Review: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Normally, I prefer to watch a movie first, then only read the book if I like the movie. But in the case of Never Let Me Go, I read from the comments in IMDB that it is better to read the book first before watching the movie. One movie-goer even went so far as to say that if you haven't read the book you won't understand what the movie is about as a lot of the details were left out.

Well, I've read the book but haven't got around to watching the movie yet. It's still sitting there in my computer. Never Let Me Go is told from the perspective of Kathy, one of the three protagonists. They were clones though they were not sure if they were modeled from a real person. Their purpose for existing is to be organ donors, though Kathy and her two friends, Ruth and Tommy, yearned for a normal life.

Sounds familiar? Yes, it is along the same lines as the movie "The Island". But unlike "The Island", the clones did not escape.

They didn't have their freedom curbed like the clones in "The Island", but they never made any effort to escape. It made me think and wonder why. I guess perhaps they were afraid to leave the world they know and venture out into the unknown? So many opportunities were lost, and in the end, Kathy was left with questions like what if they had done something before it was too late.

It also made me think deeply of how sometimes science chooses to ignore the obvious. A clone is also a human being, not a "creature" to be reviled like a spider. He or she has emotions, just like a real human. What right then, do we have for creating a sentient being only to ask him to serve his purpose for existence by donating his organs and when the critical organs were donated, the clone shuts down (the term is referred to as 'complete' in the book) and is only kept alive with the aid of machines until the very last organ has been donated? It sounds pretty inhumane to me. I hope in the real world, science won't get that far.

Book Review: Under The Dome by Stephen King

I just finished reading this book last night. It was released in the US in November last year, and I only managed to lay my hands on a copy of the e-book last week. 

Under The Dome is definitely one of the better stories written by Stephen King. Don't get me wrong, he has written quite a few can't-put-it-down books, and I am a die-hard fan of his. But this book is really something else. It's not King's usual scare-you-shitless book, although I love to be scared silly.. Rather, it is more like Carrie or Misery, a book on human characters and what they're capable of. If you have read Carrie/Misery or seen the movies, you would know what I mean. 

The story opens on a beautiful fall day in Chester's Mill, a small town in Maine, with a population of 1152 when inexplicably, the town is cut off from the rest of the world by an invisible force field. Planes crashed into it, animals are cut into half, cars imploded upon impact, people with electronic devices like pacemaker exploded when they got too near it, while families who went on errands in neighbouring towns are unable to return home.

That said, 90% of the story is not about blood and gore. Instead, it focuses on the town folks, on how they react and change in the face of 'catastrophe'. 

I couldn't stop talking about the book to my hubby. I was sure it would be made into a TV movie, and this morning, the minute I woke up, I troll the net to see if there is any plans to make a movie out of it. And....I wasn't surprised to find that Steven Spielberg has already bought rights to Under The Dome to make it into a mini-series. I can't wait to watch it.