I read loads and loads of King books when I was a young kid and I can actually credit him for helping me develop my interest in writing (how I ended up writing about human relationships and not thrillers/horror/paranormal is another story), so it was nice to reconnect with him for his latest work (since he’s so prolific, by the time you read this, it might not be his latest work).

The novel with the cryptic title 11/22/63 is about a man that gets the possibility to travel back in time and stop the assassination of JFK. I’m not going to say more than that, because I’m only 30% into the book at the moment, but so far it’s been a thrilling ride. King really has a masterful storyteller’s voice and really makes you want to dip back into his world, again and again and again.

Recommended!

Buy it on Amazon

I rarely get into an album the way I have with David Berkeley‘s Some Kind of Cure and a week ago I didn’t even know the guy existed.

But thanks to Harlan Cobens Twitter I was informed about a song called Shelter (a soundtrack to a book, pretty original) which I really liked that led me to David’s homepage where you can listen to his songs.

After that I was pretty much hooked. As soon as you enter the page you’re met by David’s husky voice almost whispering out the lyrics to The Blood and The Wine.

Tell me that you still remember,
When we caught lightning in a jar.

Now you have put the sway back in the grass.
You have put the fire back in me.

There were times when you were hiding.
And I know I’ve been hard to hold.

But you have put the wine back in the glass.
You have put the blood back in me.

And oh, oh my word.

There’s a blue house in the distance.
There’s a stream beside it, too.

Well you have put the sails back on the mast.

You have put the breeze back in me.

Oh, oh my word.
Oh, oh my word.
Oh, oh my word.

Now you have put the wine back in the glass.
You have put the blood back in me.

And after that slow and hypnotic tune he launches into George Square which is a bit more poppy and suddenly you’re transferred to a Springtime walk under a boulevard of sun-streaked trees with your loved one. The mood in Berkeley’s songs are that strong, they tell such a rich story and they paint a imagery so vivid, I’ve been listening to the same songs daily for more than a week and I still can’t get enough.

Two fantastic verses from George Square:

She was walking cross George Square in the rain.
I was high. I was so high in a plane.
I was trying to see through the clouds, 
Looking for places we’d been,
Like a sign, like a sunburst, like the letters in her name.

We were back in George Square when the rain gave way.
There’s something in how the spring comes so suddenly.
And the dress she wore was yellow.
And the rain was in her hair.
How bad I wanted to tell her that I would always be there.

The whole experience made me not only buy Some Kind of Cure but also buy the book about the album called 140 Goats and a Guitar which describes the year David, his wife and his son spent on Corsica. This stay resulted in many of the songs on Some Kind of Cure and each anecdote is followed by the lyrics to that particular song. I’ve read about 30% (I’m reading it on my Kindle) and I really love it so far.

But then I’ve become something of a David Berkeley fan of late.

The story in Friends with Benefits is very similar to No Strings Attached, the main question being, can you be friends and have sex and still be friends?

Since these are Hollywood “romcoms” you would surely know the answer after only five minutes – of course you can’t! Because love is always in the air and everyone will get contaminated, especially when genitalia get in the way.

This is one of the problems with both of these movies, you’ve figured them out before they even start. Since these are romcoms that’s usually fine, but the additional problems with these particular two movies is:

1. The lack of charisma/connection in and between the main characters.
2. Lame and unrealistic dialogue and character personalities.
3. Too many awkward sex scenes.

Number three is very apparent in both Friends with Benefits and No Strings Attached. There’s all this fake love-making and it’s pretty awkward to watch. If you want to watch people having sex I don’t think you go for romantic comedies and if it’s awkward for the actors (which it must be!) it gets at least as awkward for the people watching.

I want to add that we didn’t finish neither Friends with Benefits nor No Strings Attached and so maybe they got a LOT better after the first hour, but I very much doubt it. In Friends with Benefits we even fast-forwarded to the end to watch the soul-cringing last scene (SPOILER ALERT! – but if you didn’t see it coming you haven’t watched many of these movies) where Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis realize they really love each other.

So do yourself a favor and skip these two. Even in the sometimes dubious genre of romantic comedies, they are complete stinkers.

Both Lenah and I truly enjoyed Bridesmaids. A very funny movie with some brilliant acting in it, especially from lead actress Kristen Wiig.

Bridesmaids got 7.3/10 at IMDb, which is really good for a comedy.

You deserve a laugh, goddammit.

I’ve listened to Watch the Throne from Kanye West and Jay-Z for a few days now and I’m not sure whether to like it or feel slightly disappointed it. I think both actually, I kind of expected more from these two greats.

I don’t even know which is supposed to be the hit on the album. With Kanye’s last one (Dark and Twisted Fantasy, yeah the theme is there) it was obvious that “Power” and “All the Lights” was going to strike gold, platinum, whatever.

But not with Watch the Throne. The first song No Church In the Wild has a great beat with a rumbling bass-line and the excellent chorus sung by Frank Ocean:

Human being to the mob
What’s a mob to a king?
What’s a king to a god?
What’s a god to a non-believer?
Who don’t believe in anything?

The theme to Watch the Throne feels a bit apocalyptic (DARK) in most of the songs, but it never takes the whole journey, it never blasts through and touches you on some deeper level. It’s good, competent, but not something special, not legendary (which I’m sure is where Jay-Z and Kanye planned it to go).

This is the opening (Jay-Z) from Watch the Throne which summarizes the feel of the album:

Tears on the mauseoleum floor
Blood stains the coliseum doors
Lies on the lips of a priest
Thanksgiving disguised as a feast
Rollin’ in the Rolls-Royce Corniche
Only the doctors got this, I’m hidin’ from police
Cocaine seats
All white like I got the whole thing bleached
Drug dealer chic
I’m wonderin’ if a thug’s prayers reach
Is Pious pious cause God loves pious?
Socrates asks, “Whose bias do y’all seek?”
All for Plato, screech
I’m out here ballin’, I know ya’ll hear my sneaks
Jesus was a carpenter, Yeezy, laid beats
Hova flow the Holy Ghost, get the hell up out your seats
Preach

Other good tracks are: Niggas in Paris, Otis, Gotta have it, Murder To Excellence. Pick it up, it’s good, it’s just not glorious. Buy Watch the Throne

I’m about 40% through (thanks Kindle) Jonathan Franzen‘s much talked-about book Freedom and I’m enjoying it a lot although it is starting to get a bit weird. I was surprised too see that the book only got 3 stars out of 5 on Amazon. Below are two featured reviews, starting with the negative one.

“Negative reviews get no love on Amazon, but, having been thoroughly taken in by the glowing reviews in the NYT, Time, the Economist, etc., I feel compelled to add a voice of dissent and caution.

I read and enjoyed The Corrections, so was looking forward to seeing what Franzen had been up to for the past 10 years. What he’s been up to is, essentially, rewriting The Corrections, but extracting all the humor that leavened the misanthropic bleakness of his vision in the earlier work. Once again we’re presented with an outwardly “perfect” nuclear Midwestern family that secretly consists of neurotic hysterics with low self-esteem who ultimately find themselves mired in infidelity and morally dubious business dealings. Once again the focus is on generational conflict, and the “sins of the fathers” revisited in the lives of the children.

Besides the lack of originality, the problem, in essence, is this time out I don’t believe a single, solitary word of it. I don’t believe in liberal middle-class parents who’d let their teenage son move in with their obnoxious Republican neighbors. I don’t believe in a talented college athlete who’d let herself be hoodwinked for years by a ditzy, obsessive fan. I don’t believe in a committed environmentalist who’d sign off on strip mining vast tracts of virgin forest in the name of reclaiming those tracts many years afterwards for a single-species preserve. I don’t believe in a 19-year-old arms dealer making procurement purchases in Paraguay. I don’t believe in a couple who remain married, but utterly incommunicado, for 6 years. I don’t believe in a 47-year-old man with no religious convictions who is trying beer for the very first time, and is prone to bursting into tears on the least provocation. And that’s just for starters.

Worse, the dialogue this time out is actually painful to read in its patent artificiality. I defy anyone to point to a passage in this book and seriously maintain that this is how parents, children or lovers actually talk to one another, in 2010 or ever. It’s as stilted and laden with portentousness as soap opera dialogue. In a plot-driven page-turner in the Grisham mode, this wouldn’t be a fatal flaw, but Freedom, with its political and social preoccupations, is a novel that wants to be taken be seriously, and that’s simply not possible when the characters speak in an uninterrupted steam of cliche.

The very worst bit, however, is Patty’s 200-page “autobiography” which purports to be her life story told in her own voice, but is, in fact, completely indistinguishable from the authorial voice used in the rest of the novel. That this “autobiography” is later part of significant — and, again, wholly unbelievable — plot twist compounds this reader’s dismay.

A last problem is the characterization in the novel. One-dimensional caricatures abound, from Patty’s Hippie-dippy sister Abigail to Walter’s starry-eyed, buxom assistant Lalith to Joey’s shallow, glamour-puss love-interest Jenna to the shrill Fundamentalist kook who plays a significant role in the final section of the novel. The main characters — Walter, Patty, Richard, and Joey — are more developed, but scarcely more believable. Walter’s character, for instance, does a 180 — starting as a preternaturally patient, kind, dutiful son and husband, and becoming an erratic, impatient, unhinged hothead. The problem is not so much the change in personality — people do change over time — but the fact that the reader isn’t privy to what drives or motivates the change. We see the college-age milquetoast and the middle-aged fanatic, but no steps in between.

It gives me no particular pleasure to trash this novel. Franzen is to be commended for attempting something ambitious in a Tolstoyan mode (Tolstoy is, in fact, referenced directly and indirectly throughout the novel) — to give an American picture of “how we live now.” But, for me, unfortunately, his effort here falls completely flat, and I can’t possibly recommend it to anyone.”

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I’ve not been a Jonathon Franzen fan until now. I didn’t like the people in Corrections which spoiled the book for me. On the first page of Freedom I was already very worried I was about to repeat the same experience. I’m very happy I persevered. Last night, I finished the final page with tears in my eyes.

The characters are full of the flaws we all have and they learn to endure, just like us.

One day Michael R Hicks added me on twitter under the name of @kreelanwarrior probably because I have “writer” somewhere in my profile (yeah, I’m not far from publishing my first novel on Kindle) and after reading a few of his tweets and finding out about his sci-fi series “In Her Name” I decided to give it a go and download the sample of In Her Name (Omnibus Edition) which contains the three first books.

The In Her Name series is about an alien race called the Kreelans and their war with the humans. In the middle we have Reza Gard who, after having his parents killed and his planet blown to smithereens by the aliens, are brought up among the blue-skinned Kreelans as one of many children in an experiment to see if the humans possess a soul. Reza faces many challenges and has several close shaves with death but in the end grows into a true Kreelan warrior and even falls in love with a woman in the Kreelan race. The problem is that the Kreelans ask him to starts fighting the humans and when he refuses to fight his own blood he’s banned from the Kreelan homeworld and thrown back to the humans. But the humans are in the middle of waging a war against the Kreelans and Reza is now wedged in between the two and becomes a key figure in a giant war that might come to spell the end of the world.

That’s my three minute summary of the story line but I assure you In Her Name (Omnibus Edition) holds many interesting plots and subplots and the characters are quite rich for a science fiction/fantasy book. The book is only five bucks on Amazon so I was surprised and impressed by the quality of it. It’s 800 pages long and I read it every morning in the gym and enjoyed it immensely. I should add that I’m definitely no sci-fi or fantasy fan and mostly read literary or commercial fiction and business books, which means In Her Name (Omnibus Edition) had something extra to offer.

In Her Name is a bit like a mix of Avatar, Star Trek, Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings and very enjoyable even if you normally don’t like sci-fi or fantasy. I wouldn’t be surprised if they made a movie out of it.

Is On Writing by super famous thriller writer Stephen King. King is often taken very lightly in “serious” literary circles, but although his subject is most often horror and thrillers, a genre disliked by literary award committees, there’s no doubt that he’s a great writer who knows how as well as anyone how to tell a story. It’s just that his stories are a bit on the gory side sometimes.

I actually think King’s writing are at his best in his short stories like The Shawshank Redemption, with no supernatural themes in it.

On Writing is recently released in its 10th Anniversary edition called On Writing: 10th Anniversary Edition: A Memoir of the Craft and it’s a fantastic memoir of a great writer and at the same time a manual on how to become a good writer. I really recommend it.

You can buy it here in Kindle format, Hardcover, Paperback or Audio CD. Every purchase through this link will give this blog a few cents in support. Thanks.

I’m currently reading the Kindle version of Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane. It’s made into a movie by Martin Scorsese, featuring Leonardo Di Caprio in the leading role. It’s a great book and movie and I really recommend it.

You can check out more books from thriller writer Dennis Lehane here.

Lenah loves Mexican culture (and interior design) so I bought her this beautiful book as a gift. You can’t have enough coffee table books! (Well, you can, it depends on the size of your coffee table).

Check out Living In Mexico from the fantastic book publisher Taschen.