City Of Thieves - David Benioff

At first, when I picked up this book, I really didn't know what to expect from this book.. I thought this was going be another mundane read.. 'Cause the book deals more with the oppression in Russia during World War II..

As soon as I went past Chapter I.. Man.. I knew I was going to be in for a treat!

The read really started with aplomb. In the beginning, the story delves in a Jewish protagonist's predicaments in the face of an incoming war. Overall, I really like how the story begins. At first, it talks about the protagonist's, Lev's first brush of the war with a company of friends. Deeper into the story, we only get to know that Lev's friends were actually from the same flat as him. They managed to make a camp at the rooftop or rather, at the top of the building. They volunteered  as firefighters or as an army for their country in their area.

In the midst of the beginning of the story, they discovered a German soldier in a parachute who had fallen from the sky. It turned out then that fortunately, the German had in fact died during the fall due to the extremely cold weather in Leningrad. From this, the story then quickly moves on to the imprisonment of Lev.

It then quickly talks about Lev being imprisoned in a dark prison, in total solitary. Lev, who couldn't sleep in his cell, only had his thoughts to entertain him. Next, he heard some shuffling outside his cell's door, he knew that the guards had came over to deliver his sentence. On the contrary, it turned out that in fact, they wanted to insert a new prisoner in the same cell as him. He only managed to catch a glimpse of the new prisoner before the cell's gate closed on them.

I actually like how the story turns out later. At first, as it starts with the introduction of a group of youngsters serving as army for Russia, I thought it is about the survival of a bunch of kids during a war, although in retrospect, I knew it was about two persons' quest for a dozen of eggs during a city's siege. I didn't really know how the story would pan out. I didn't know later it would talk about, albeit briefly, the philosophical insights of a teenage boy in a dark cell, his last thoughts before his final execution. I was quite surprised by that, honestly.

After all these surprises, I was actually quite glad and content with the introduction of Kolya, Lev's companion in their quest for those eggs in the command of a colonel for making of the colonel's daughter's wedding cake (Huh? Lol..). I really enjoyed his company, his musings and his witty banter with Lev. He is indeed a wonderful character. I would definitely consider it worthy to listen to Kolya's rambling all day long, if given the chance. I wouldn't mind it really. Without any spoilers, I was pretty amused with Kolya's reference to a book. Hmmm..

And not forgetting the cute Vika of course..

Below are some excerpt from the book that I really like, so enjoy!:

"He looked at me just as the guards left, shutting the cell door and bolting it from the outside, taking their light with them. His face was the last thing I saw before the darkness resumed, so it's stuck in my mind: the high Cossack cheekbones, the amused twist of the lips, the hay-bound hair, the eyes blue enough to please any Aryan bride."

"He tossed his pad of paper on the desk and I could see that he hadn't been taking notes, as I'd thought, but simply drawing X's, over and over again, till the entire sheet of paper was covered with them. For some reason this frightened me more than his uniform or his brawler's face. A man who drew pictures of tits or dogs seemed like a man I could understand. But a man who drew nothing but X's?"

"We stood on the sidewalk, beneath a powerless streetlamp cobwebbed with hoarfrost, the great guns firing to the south, the moon veiled by muslin clouds, listening until the final note. When it ended, something seemed wrong: the performance was too good to go unacknowledged, the performer too skilled to accept no applause. For a long moment we were silent, staring up at the dark windows. Finally, when it seemed respectful to move again, we resumed our march."

"He tugged me down from the hill of rubble and I was too weak to resist, too tired for grief or anger or defiance. I wanted to be warm. I wanted to eat. We walked away from the Kirov's remnants and I could not hear my footsteps. I had become a phantom. There was no one left in the city who knew my full name. I felt no great misery for myself, just a kind of dull curiosity that I still seemed to be alive, my exhalations still visible in the moonlight, this son of Cossacks still marching beside me, looking at me from time to time to make sure I kept moving checking the night sky for bombers."

"I never understood people who said their greatest fear was public speaking, or spiders, or any of the other minor terrors. How could you fear any thing more than death? Everything else offered moments of escape: a paralyzed man could still read Dickens; a man in the grips of dementia might have flashes of the most absurd beauty."

"I was sitting on a window ledge watching her and trying to make sure she didn't know I was watching her. She had stripped off her coveralls to let them dry. She wore a heavy wool woodcutter's shirt that once belonged to a man twice her size and two pairs of long underwear. Unlike most redheads, she didn't have a single freckle. She worried at her upper lip with the bottom row of her crooked little teeth. I couldn't stop looking at her. She was no man's idea of a pinup girl-underfed as she was, looking like she'd spent the last week sleeping in the forest-but I wanted to see her naked. I wanted to unbutton the woodcutter's shirt, toss it aside, and lick her pale belly, strip off the long underwear and kiss her thin thighs."

"Talent must be a fanatical mistress. She's beautiful; when you're with her, people watch you, they notice. But she bangs on your door at odd hours, and she disappears for long stretches, and she has no patience for the rest of your existence: your wife, your children, your friends. She is the most thrilling evening of your week, but some day she will leave you for good. One night, after she's been gone for years, you will see her on the arm of a younger man, and she will pretend not to recognize you."

Damn, it is this good!!

Excerpt from Damned by Chuck Palahniuk

Are you there, Satan? It’s me, Madison. I’m just now arrived here, in Hell, but it’s not my fault except for maybe dying from an overdose of marijuana. Maybe I’m in Hell because I’m fat—a Real Porker. If you can go to Hell for having low self-esteem, that’s why I’m here. I wish I could lie and tell you I’m bone-thin with blond hair and big ta-tas. But, trust me, I’m fat for a really good reason.

To start with, please let me introduce myself.

How to best convey the exact sensation of being dead…

Yes, I know the word convey. I’m dead, not a mental defective.

Trust me, the being-dead part is much easier than the dying part. If you can watch much television, then being dead will be a cinch. Actually, watching television and surfing the Internet are really excellent practice for being dead.

The closest way I can describe death is to compare it to when my mom boots up her notebook computer and hacks into the surveillance system of our house in Mazatlan or Banff. “Look,” she’d say, turning the screen sideways for me to see, “it’s snowing.” Glowing softly on the computer would be the interior of our Milan house, the sitting room, with snow falling outside the big windows, and by long distance, holding down her Control, Alt and W keys, my mom would draw open the sitting room drapes all the way. Pressing the Control and D keys, she’d dim the lights by remote control and we’d both sit, on a train or in a rented town car or aboard a leased jet, watching the pretty winter view through the windows of that empty house displayed on her computer screen. With the Control and F keys, she’d light a fire in the gas fireplace, and we’d listen to the hush of the Italian snow falling, the crackle of the flames via the audio monitors of the security system. After that, my mom would keyboard into the system for our house in Cape Town. Then log on to view our house in Brentwood. She could simultaneously be all places but no place, mooning over sunsets and foliage everywhere except where she actually was. At best, a sentry. At worst, a voyeur.

My input: This is another book I simply went browsing in the bookstore.. Another book that managed to grab my attention.. At these sentences of "At best, a sentry" and "At worst, a voyeur", I was completely astounded and blown away by the magnificence of Palahniuk's own writings.. Words just can't describe the brilliance of this writer.. The writer was talking about the protagonist's experience of being able to be at two places at the same time and then he quickly summed it up by those brief deft sentences.. 

Over the years, I have seen the author's writings getting better and better by the day.. Not to say that his previous writings were not good, his latest offering was just simply breathtaking.. I was completely taken aback.. I knew it had to be modern because I had never seen such writings (poetry mixed with narrative) in such choice of words from any writers before, if you know what I mean.. 

The Sisters Brothers??

Excerpt from The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt

I was sitting outside the Commodore’s mansion, waiting for my brother Charlie to come out with news of the job. It was threatening to snow and I was cold and for want of something to do I studied Charlie’s new horse Nimble. My new horse was called Tub. We did not believe in naming horses but they were given to us as partial payment for the last job with the names intact, so that was that. Our unnamed previous horses had been immolated, so it was not as though we did not need these new ones, but I felt we should have been given money to purchase horses of our own choosing, horses without histories and habits and names they expected to be addressed by. I was very fond of my previous horse and had lately been experiencing visions while I slept of his death, his kicking, burning legs, his hot-popping eyeballs. He could cover sixty miles in a day like a gust of wind and I never laid a hand on him except to stroke him or clean him, and I tried not to think of him burning up in that barn but if the vision arrived uninvited how was I to guard against it? Tub was a healthy enough animal but would have been better suited to some other, less ambitious owner. He was portly and low-backed and could not travel more than fifty miles in a day. I was often forced to whip him, which some men do not mind doing and which in fact some enjoy doing, but which I did not like to do and afterward he, Tub, believed me cruel and thought to himself, Sad life, sad life.

I felt a weight of eyes on me and looked away from Nimble. Charlie was gazing down from the upper-story window, holding up five fingers. I did not respond and he distorted his face to make me smile; when I did not smile his expression fell slack and he moved backwards, out of view. He had seen me watching his horse, I knew. The morning before I had suggested we sell Tub and go halves on a new horse and he had agreed this was fair but then later, over lunch, he said we should put it off until the new job was completed, which did not make sense because the problem with Tub was that he would impede the job, so would it not be best to replace him prior to? Charlie had a slick of food grease in his mustache and he told me, “After the job is best, Eli.” He had no complaints with Nimble, who was as good or better than his previous horse, unnamed, but then he had had first pick of the two while I lay in bed recovering from a leg wound received on the job. I did not like Tub but my brother was satisfied with Nimble. This was the trouble with the horses.

My input: At first, I didn't know about this book at all, let alone the author himself.. But having seen a lot of people raving about this book in their blogs, it kind of piqued my curiosity and in the end, I couldn't resist sampling a bit of the book myself, although knowing that the book falls under the Western genre (which is not really my type of genre and which is also a genre I'm not familiar with).. So I searched the Internet for the excerpt from the book.. 

I have actually read the above excerpt for quite a while.. I therefore somehow find it quite hard to recall my initial thoughts on the excerpt.. But based on my first impression of it, as I still manage to recall a bit (it can't be that hard, right? It's an impression after all), I managed to find the writings rather witty.. You just couldn't grasp where the narrator (in this book, Eli) was trying to lead you to.. For example, based on the excerpt itself, you could see that at one point, the narrator was meandering on some menial subjects like the lack of strength of his own horse, Tub  (named this time).. And then it ended up with the narrator thinking that his horse might be thinking "Sad life, sad life" to himself.. 

Later into the story, we could find that Eli, the narrator was in fact treated unjustly by his brother, Charlie.. Back to the narrator's comments about his horse, was he juxtaposing himself with his own horse (hence his horse was referred as a "he")? That was why I could find the writings full of such conflicts, more like self-deprecating satire of himself, which were simply pretty amazing and brilliant. This was why, after the narrator related about his brother's unfair treatment, it ended with "This was the trouble with the horses". Was he talking about himself or his horse again?

Regardless of its genre, it was obvious that the book was not written conventionally like all those Western book written before it (I therefore decided to read this book in the future).. Furthermore, the writings were a bit morbid too (the previous burned-to-death horse), which made the story altogether more interesting.. I also know that this book was shortlisted for Man Booker Prize i.e. all the more reasons to read this book!!

Post note: "Sisters" is the brothers' family name.. Eh, confusing?

Time

Excerpt from "The White Devil" by Justin Evans

Time had changed for Andrew. Back at Frederick Williams, it moved in horrible jerks, sometimes dragging out cruelly, he would measure out time in bummed cigarettes and drifting conversations he would pick up and discard around the common rooms like a small-town browser going back to a shop for the hundredth time. Then it would pounce. An exam. A paper due. As if time were some wicked funhouse machine, tuned by a mustache-twirling villain. But at Harrow, his isolation - fewer classes, fewer friends - slowed time, and made it a different element. At FW it had been fire: hypnotizing, then suddenly consuming. At Harrow, it was water: heaving, dense; deliberate.

My input: I'm still reading this book. What I can say about this book right now is that it has been hitting all the right spots most of the time.. The writings are utterly crisp, dense, wicked, chilling and playful..