Oliver Sacks is a neurologist and this non-fiction book details some of his stranger cases.

There are a lot of different levels to this book. In fact, it’s hard to know quite where to start. Perhaps the stories themselves? One man walked with such an enormous tilt to one side that people described him as being like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. He had to have a spirit level built into his glasses.

And his case was probably the mildest in the book.

Throughout the book, Sacks stresses the importance of emotion in the sciences, particularly neurology. He is profoundly aware that the cases he describes are not just cases, but people. Sometimes emotion provides a key to helping them that science does not.

Where the science stimulates the intellect and curiosity about what Sacks is writing about, the emotion in most cases makes it at once both a profoundly sad and uplifting book. There is a sense of suffering captured—not necessarily of the person afflicted (although it’s sometimes the case), but also of their family and even Sacks himself when he is unable to help them. At the same time it shows how kindness and compassion help overcome perceived handicaps.

The narrative occasionally gets bogged down in medical terminology but Sacks awareness that these are human stories quickly redeems it.

I have no idea how to even begin summarizing Valis. I suppose the simplest way would be to say that it’s about a character called Horselover Fat who throughout the novel attempts to come to terms with the suicide of a friend and an event where he believed he experienced God.

But don’t be fooled. This is in no way a simple novel. Not even close. In fact I found it so densely packed with theories of all kinds—religious, psychological, metaphysical, true, false and the characters’ theories on all these things and what is happening—that I found the first half in particular a real struggle to get through. Adding to this was the fact that I didn’t find it very entertaining. It has little in the way of conventional plot, being a book more about ideas.

In that respect, I could see a bit of a parallel with Virginia Woolf, which is what kept me going. I’m torn between whether the confusion was deliberately induced in the reader to mimic the state of madness Horselover Fat experiences or whether it is simply written badly. I lean towards the former, given how highly Dick is generally regarded.

Also, the ambiguous relationship between the narrator (who happens to be Dick himself) and the protagonist of Horselover Fat shows great skill from Dick in leaving the reader off-balance (or perhaps it should be unbalanced). On the whole, you’re never quite sure where you stand. The biography at the end adds to this by suggesting that there is some autobiographical basis in some form for the plot.

If you’re interested in madness and insanity, particularly in relation to religion and time, this is definitely a must-read book. Just don’t necessarily expect it to make sense.

From the blurb:

Walking the streets of Moscow, indistinguishable from the rest of its population, are the Others. Possessors of supernatural powers and capable of entering the Twilight, a shadowy world that exists in parallel to our own, each Other owes allegiance either or the Dark or the Light.

Others cannot reproduce reliably, as it is not something conveyed genetically, and the war between Dark and Light left numbers low. So the sides agreed on a truce and formed the Night Watch and the Day watch to ensure balance is maintained.

The Night Watch follows Anton, a Night Watchman who must patrol the city, protecting ordinary people from rogue magicians of the Dark. The novel is sub-divided into three books, each revolving around the same characters and with an overall plot linking the three. In fact the division seems largely unnecessary, except that some time passes between each of the books.

The use of perspective was quite interesting. Each book has a prologue written in third person, but the chapters are written in first person from Anton’s point of view. The style is solid with a good sense of his character.

I found the whole thing a little uneven. It was a touch predictable in places and a little confusing in others. It’s very much a book about strategy as Light and Dark attempt to outmanoeuvre each other while still maintaining the rules of truce. Motivations are deliberately unclear in places and the action sometimes brought twists I had trouble following at first.

I wouldn’t say that any of the ideas it uses are particularly original, but overall, it’s fairly solid and I found it quite an enjoyable read. It’s obviously quite different from the movie of the same name and I rather preferred it.

Whoever at the Daily Telegraph is responsible for calling it “J.K Rowling, Russian style” ought to be shot as should the publisher for having put it on the front cover. Other than the fact it is urban fantasy and involves supernatural creatures, the two are completely different. It’s an ignorant comparison that doesn’t do The Night Watch any credit.

For a summary, Wikipedia covers it pretty well:

The book concerns three generations of women affected by a Virginia Woolf novel.

The first is Woolf herself writing Mrs. Dalloway in 1923 and struggling with her own mental illness. The second is Mrs. Brown, wife of a World War II veteran, who is reading Mrs. Dalloway in 1949 as she plans her husband’s birthday party. The third is Clarissa Vaughn, a lesbian, who plans a party in 1998 to celebrate a major literary award received by her good friend and former lover, the poet Richard, who is dying of AIDS.

I loved the layers to this. It starts out with quite a strong imitation of Virginia Woolf’s writing style. This gets diluted further in, as it mixes with a more conventional style and in particular dialogue. But in the characters and the themes, it had great echoes of Mrs Dalloway, often twisted a bit to form something new and unique. Its examination of mental illness is quite a powerful one, looking as it does at three different manifestations and combined with the wonderful interiority Virginia Woolf was so good at.

This is a book with wonderful depth and I enjoyed it immensely.

I read this book on a recommendation from my thesis supervisor, as I am writing about mental illness.

I love Virginia Woolf, though it’s hard for me to explain why. I think some of it is to do with the daringness of what she writes. This might seem like a strange thing to say, given that it is largely about a single day in which a member of London society throws a party. The events themselves are very ordinary, yet they are told in such an extraordinary way.

Woolf gives each of the characters a fairly distinct voice, although there is very little direct dialogue in the book. Most of it takes the form of a kind of monologue that is written in the third person, but which is so deeply internal to the characters. This monologue flows seemlessly from person to person (so characteristic of her work). It’s the kind of book you really have to pay attention to reading or you suddenly find yourself reading the story of a new character with absolutely no idea about how you got there. It’s the kind of book I’d love to study with my old Literary Studies lecturer because it has so many levels and I’m sure half of it went over my head.

I only wish I could do it justice.

Bird by Bird was recommended by a number of writers I admire. By and large, it is a book of advice for fiction writers, though writers of creative non-fiction may also find some of the tips are useful.

This is another book that leaves me with mixed feelings. When I began it, I found it to be quite warm and engaging. It is liberally sprinkled with interesting stories from the author’s life and the advice is in no way sugar coated. She freely admits that writing is a struggle, that December is a terrible month for writing and that you should never begin writing a large project on a Monday. It’s almost a relief to hear someone else admit these things.

However, the more I read the more vitriolic she seemed to get. She clearly has strong beliefs on certain subjects—largely unrelated to writing—and I felt they got in the way of what was otherwise quite an interesting book. It tainted the experience for me and left me quite disappointed.

Nevertheless, there was some valuable (if not particularly original) advice and on the whole made for a nice pep talk.

Mary Reilly is a spin-off from Robert Louis Stephenson’s short story Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. It focuses on Mary Reilly, a maid in Dr Jekyll’s household, who, in part due to her own traumatic childhood, finds herself attracted to her boss.

I think I was far too influenced by the 1995 movie version of this book, because it left me obscurely disappointed. I felt like at all times the story was oblique to the original story, never really quite interacting with it. The reader never really witnesses a full transformation of Jekyll and there are certainly no dramatic final scenes as in the movie (severed head and all). Nor is the love angle played up as it might have been, but is simply a way to involve Mary in a story that never really becomes involving.

Time has not been kind to the original, as the true identity of Jekyll and Hyde is supposed to remain a mystery, dramatically revealed at the end. These days it is certainly no secret, thus rather spoiling the story. Given that Mary Reilly follows the original so closely, it rather suffers also, though it makes use of the reader’s knowledge to have Mary say a few apt things.

The afterword at the ending was completely useless. Rather reminicent of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale it details how Mary’s journals came into the publisher’s hands and speculates on their authenticity. As with The Handmaid’s Tale, this is completely unnecessary and detracts rather than adds to the story.

Still, I did manage to enjoy the book on some level. Mary’s voice is extremely well done and it manages to capture the gloomy, gothic London feel wonderfully.

I took a bit of a break between this book and the second in the trilogy, so perhaps that explains why I was a bit irritated with it, particularly in the beginning. Ashlind’s internal monologues struck me as being rather info-dumpish, not to mention clumsy and melodramatic. The dialogue seemed very stilted and about as far from reality as you could get. And if I read the word “pleached” or “plashed” one more time I might have done something drastic. There was definitely an overabundance of description, as there has been throughout the entire series.

I’m afraid I can’t really say more without spoilers, so those who intend to read this and like to be surprised should stop reading here.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you. I found the holes in Ashlind’s memory to be very convienient. Neither did Thorn’s identity come as any great surprise.

And as for the ending… well, I guess I felt that the Epilogue greatly weakened it. It was as if the author couldn’t decide which ending she really wanted, and so had to see-saw between them without really commiting to either. In some respects I can understand this, as the hopeless romantic in me wished for the one ending my more cynical side would have derided.

I felt very much that the Edward strand should have been more fully developed and earlier on.

All in all, it left me feeling vaguely disappointed.

For a small book, this packs a lot in. It’s the kind of book you need to own, so that you can pick it up time after time, read a little and go away to ponder and practice.

It focuses on the practice of mindfulness, so essential in the Buddhist tradition. Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh really makes an effort to translate this tradition into the modern world and looks at how mindfulness can be practiced while getting into your car or listening to the phone ring.

The structure of the book is well thought out. It starts with basic practices, some of which can be practiced anywhere and any time and the rest of which involve common situations like eating a meal.

The next section looks at mindfulness from more of a psychological perspective; how mindfulness can be used to deal with emotions and get to the difficulties underlying those emotions. It also extends into compassion and mindfully living with those around you, seeking first to understand.

This last point is magnified in the last section, extending to being mindful of our impact on the Earth itself and treating our environment with respect. He also touches on war and the efforts he was engaged in during the Vietnam War.

Each section is comprised of a number of very short essays, often no more than a page long. I found this made it very digestable; I could read through the book quickly to get a sense of the whole before coming back to further ponder each individual section.

His style was simple, warm and engaging. Perfect for a book of this nature.

This book combines two interests of mine—archetypes (along with Jungian psychology) and Greek mythology. No doubt that was the reason I enjoyed this book so much.

Having said that, the writing style certainly helped. Bolen presents the concepts in a way that is clear and easy to understand. She peppers explanations with examples from myth, popular culture and from her own experiences as a psychologist. In her more candid moments, she comes across as being open and warm.

Archetypes represent patterns of behaviour and ways of thinking. Bolen postulates that in every woman there are seven such archetypes represented by the three virgin goddesses (Artemis, Athena and Hestia), three vulnerable goddesses (Hera, Demeter and Persephone) and one alchemical goddess (Aphrodite). Any one or several may be present or dominant. For each of the goddesses she details the mythology, features of the archetype, how that archetype may manifest itself in behaviour, psychological difficulties the archetype may foster and ways of growing beyond it. She also touches on difficulties that may occur when differing archetypes conflict within the same person.

I found it quite a fascinating read. Most work on archetypes I’ve read remain strictly theoretical, focusing on literary characters or on wider symbolism, rather than actual patterns of behaviour. This book, in contrast, remained very much grounded in reality. I could recognise images of myself, people I know and characters within today’s popular culture.

It came across as being a bit dated in some parts, however. It was originally written in the early eighties and has a tendency to focus on the archetypes in relation to feminism and feminist issues, particularly in regards to certain archetypes. It largely remains relevant, but I wonder if, given this is a twentieth anniversary edition, it could have been a bit updated for the twenty-first century.

Still, I enjoyed it very much and would like to get my hands on a copy of the male counterpart book. I think they could serve as good creative and psychological resources.