However, I realised towards the end of last year that I was really sending a lot of these miserable tweets, and not very many happy ones. And while I do find Twitter-sympathy genuinely very beneficial (seriously, I can’t tell you how many nights the only thing that’s stopped me crying was scrolling through lovely tweets from lovely people – so thank you to everyone who’s ever responded to any of my distress flares!), I keep thinking of my ever-wise mum’s advice: if you’re feeling down, count your blessings. By all means take time to be sad, but also make time to think about all the things that make you happy.

This takes effort, believe me I know! If you’re down in the dumps, for whatever reason, it’s easy to dwell on that. It’s very hard to drag your brain in a positive direction. But it is precisely because it is difficult that it is so important. Generally, happiness isn’t something that just happens. Listing all the things you have to be glad about is like a training exercise for your brain, teaching you the habit of looking beyond your immediate sadness.

So, in mid-November, I decided that every Monday, I would tweet five things that were cheering me up that day/week. Sometimes they’re personal things:

Long chat with WoodsieTwin y’day made me realise just how much I’m looking forward to spending xmas with my wonderful family #mondaycheer

— Laura Woods (@WoodsieGirl) December 17, 2012

Sometimes they’re universal things:

Chocolate. Chocolate is a thing. Imagine a world where chocolate wasn’t a thing – that would suck, right? #mondaycheer

— Laura Woods (@WoodsieGirl) February 25, 2013

Sometimes they’re random things:

There is a robot exploring Mars right now. Every so often I just remember how cool that is @marscuriosity #mondaycheer

— Laura Woods (@WoodsieGirl) February 4, 2013

And sometimes, they’re just silly cute things:

And finally: 5. This puppy in jammies: twitter.com/CuteOverload/s… (via @cuteoverload) #mondaycheer

— Laura Woods (@WoodsieGirl) March 4, 2013

But they are always cheery things! I’ve found doing this has made a huge difference to my emotional outlook. It’s not always easy: some Mondays I can barely think of anything at all, which is when you’ll see a bias towards lots of abstract concepts and cute animal pics in my #mondaycheer tweets! But just the act of making myself think of cheerful things, plus the incredibly lovely reaction from the rest of Twitter, puts me in a good mood to start the week.

I find this incredibly beneficial to do, and I’ve had lots of tweets suggesting that my followers also enjoy it! I’m also starting to see more and more people post their own #mondaycheer tweets too, which is wonderful. Because lets face it, Mondays are generally not fun-days (see what I did there?? I’m here all week…). Starting the day and week off with a few reminders of what you have to be happy about can make whatever else is coming up feel just that little bit brighter. I can’t speak for everyone, but I know my Mondays can always use more cheer

Black Vodka

As well as the excitement of my first subscription book (with my name in it!), I was really looking forward to reading something else by Deborah Levy. I read her Booker-nominated Swimming Home last year, and loved it. Although I did also love Bring up the Bodies, I still think Swimming Home should have won.

How does love change us? And how do we change ourselves for love – or for lack of it? Ten stories by acclaimed author Deborah Levy explore these delicate, impossible questions. In Vienna, an icy woman seduces a broken man; in London gardens, birds sing in computer start-up sounds; in ad-land, a sleek copywriter becomes a kind of shaman. These are twenty-first century lives dissected with razor-sharp humour and curiosity, stories about what it means to live and love, together and alone.

I’ve always had something of a love-hate relationship with short stories. A well-crafted short story can be wonderful to read, but I’ve read too many collections where the stories either left me frustrated that they didn’t go anywhere, or just with an overwhelming feeling of “meh…”. As a wannabe (but very bad!) writer, I’m also well aware of just how difficult they are to write! I’ve never managed to write any successful short fiction: I’ve never got the hang of telling a story in such a short space of time.

However, with the deceptively slim Swimming Home Levy proved she can pack a lot of story into very few words, so I had high hopes for this collection. And I was not disappointed! The stories in Black Vodka are marvellous creations: perfect shining little jewels of story, carefully sculpted with not a word wasted. They’re all very short – the perfect length to read a couple each way on my work commute, actually! – but benefit from careful reading and re-reading.

I don’t really want to talk about any of the actual stories: mainly because they’re all so wonderfully constructed, I’d a) feel like I was spoiling them, and b) wouldn’t really know how to sum them up without making them sound trite! I will mention a couple of my favourites: Cave Girl, an exploration of constructed femininity in which a boy’s sister suddenly reappears as a “pretend woman” (no, I can’t explain it any better than that – read it!); and the final story, A Better Way to Live, which is simply one of the most moving love stories I’ve ever read.

I’m completely in love with this book, and with Deborah Levy as a writer. Will have to end this review now, as I’m off to track down everything else she’s ever written

Verdict: 5/5

At the Dying of the Year

***WARNING: Contains mild spoilers for the previous books in the series***

I started my review of the previous book in the series, Come the Fear, by saying that it took “a darker turn” than the ones before it. Well, past-me, you ain’t seen nothing yet…

Leeds, 1733. Three children are found dead in a disused bell pit, their bodies battered and bruised, each of them stabbed through the heart. Fear, suspicion and violence tear at the city as Richard Nottingham, John Sedgwick and Rob Lister hunt a ruthless child-killer. The Constable is certain he knows who’s behind the murders, but his efforts to bring the killer to justice brings a blow that strikes right at his own heart.

Let me start by saying: my word, this book is bleak. Seriously bleak. If you like your historic crime nice and cosy and easily resolved, look elsewhere. From the start, it’s pretty clear that this book is showing us a more vulnerable side to Richard Nottingham, Constable of Leeds: whereas in previous books he’s always seemed pretty much in control, in this book you get a real sense of a man whose world is slipping away from him. Having been almost fatally stabbed at the end of the previous book, At the Dying of the Year sees him return to work, weakened and feeling his age, to be immediately confronted with several horrifically murdered children, and a murderer who may be beyond the reach of justice.

All the books in this series deal with the enormous gulf between the wealthy and the desperately poor at the time, but it is in this book that this division is emphasised most strongly. The poor are literally powerless, while the rich do as they please. It is also brought home just how precarious the Constable’s position is: as a man from a poor background, employed at the discretion of a mayor whose main priority will always be keeping the wealthy merchants of the city happy, his livelihood depends on pleasing those in power. If his job brings him into conflict with them, where can he turn?

This was a tough book to read. Without wanting to give any of the story away, Nottingham’s pursuit of the powerful comes at an incredibly high personal cost – leading to some things that really cut very close to the bone for me. However, I think it’s my favourite of the series so far. It’s harsh, and brutal, and doesn’t offer any easy answers, but I rather like that in a book!

Fortunately, it isn’t all unrelenting bleakness. Once again, Nickson’s rich cast of supporting characters do a wonderful job of fleshing out Nottingham’s world. I liked the passages featuring deputy John Sedgwick and his family, but mainly I loved everything about Nottingham’s daughter, Emily. She’s always been one of my favourite characters, and I was delighted to see more of her in this book! There’s a particularly lovely scene where she is at dinner with Rob Lister and his father, who’d previously voiced his disapproval of their courtship because of Emily and Nottingham’s impoverished background. Again, I don’t want to give too many details away, but this scene had me doing proper cheers in my head (only in my head, I was reading on the train!)

Nottingham’s relationship with his daughter is explored a little further in this book, leading to some lovely scenes between the two of them. I did think though that Nottingham seems a very liberal parent for the time – would a father at that period of history really have been so unconcerned that his daughter was “carrying on” with a man she’s been quite clear she has no intention of marrying?

This series just keeps getting better and better. If you haven’t read any of them so far, I would urge you to give this one a go – although I think starting from the first in the series is definitely the best way to read them all!

Verdict: 4/5

I plan to keep it updated as I think of new things to add, decide I don’t want to do any of the things I’ve listed any more, or even – gasp! – actually do some of them. If I do manage to do any of them, I will probably blog about them too!

Anyone else written a bucket list they’d like to share?

‘R’ is a zombie. He has no name, no memories, and no pulse, but he has dreams. He is a little different from his fellow Dead. Amongst the ruins of an abandoned city, R meets a girl. Her name is Julie and she is the opposite of everything he knows – warm and bright and very much alive, she is a blast of colour in a dreary grey landscape. For reasons he can’t understand, R chooses to save Julie instead of eating her, and a tense yet strangely tender relationship begins. This has never happened before. It breaks the rules and defies logic, but R is no longer content with life in the grave. He wants to breathe again, he wants to live, and Julie wants to help him. But their grim, rotting world won’t be changed without a fight…

I’d expected this to be a fairly silly, throwaway read. Maybe even blackly comic, in a Shaun of the Dead-type way (probably influenced by the cover quote!). Suffice to say, when I actually started reading it, it was not at all what I expected. I actually found it quite moving – you forget the absurd horror-movie trappings after a while and start to really care about R and Julie! It was also a surprisingly clever commentary on power, and society – which shouldn’t have been a surprise really. Post-apocalyptic horror has always been a genre with plenty to say about modern life!

The writing is also far better than I’d expected. Marion starts with a narrative trick that I’ve always disliked – narration in the first person by a character who can’t actually talk, but shows through the narration that they’re actually really articulate inside – and somehow makes it work. Partly it’s because R’s narration is so poignant, that he becomes a genuinely sympathetic character:

“But it does make me sad that we’ve forgotten our names. Out of everything, this seems to me the most tragic. I miss my own and I mourn for everyone else’s because I’d like to love them, but I don’t know who they are.”

There seems to be a recent trend for taking classic horror “monsters” and making them sympathetic, but this is the first time I’ve seen it attempted with zombies – I don’t read/watch enough horror to know if it’s actually been done like this before (the closest I can think of is I Am Legend – the book, not the film). It shouldn’t work, but it does. Marion takes the flesh-eating, shambling corpses of a thousand horror movies and video games and gives them lives, families, a society, even a religion of sorts. Not that this reduces the horror – there’s still plenty of gore in this book, which I was pleased about, there’s nothing worse than completely sanitized monsters! The zombies in this book may be a little more human than their fictional predecessors, but they are still driven to consume human flesh – reluctantly or not!

“Eating is not a pleasant business. I chew off a man’s arm, and I hate it. I hate his screams, because I don’t like pain, I don’t like hurting people, but this is what we do. This is the world now.”

The book gets even more interesting when R follows Julie to the Living’s stronghold, in an old stadium, and we see a bit of how people are surviving. This is where it goes a bit beyond “quirky love story” and into social commentary. Living behind barricades, overcrowded and fighting to survive, the remaining Living have given up on anything that does not immediately increase their survival odds:

…we built the schools once we finally accepted that this was reality, that this was the world our children would inherit. We taught them how to shoot, how to pour concrete, how to kill and how to survive, and if they made it that far, if they mastered those skills and had time to spare, then we taught them how to read and write, to reason and relate and understand their world.

It’s implied that R and Julie’s worlds, the world of the Dead and the world of the Living, are equally grey. The Living are going through the motions, driven only by their instinct to survive, in much the same way as the dead.

Without spoilers, I have to say that I found the ending a little anti-climatic. It all seemed a bit neat to me, but then I don’t really know how else it would have been wrapped up. It’s a small criticism though, and didn’t really diminish my overall enjoyment of the book.

Overall, I loved it. It’s a real page-turner too – I finished it in a couple of days. Highly recommended!

Verdict: 8/10

I’ve always said I’d never diet in January – it’s a depressing month as it is, no need to compound it by forbidding yourself comforting food! But lately, I’ve started to wonder about the wisdom of dieting at all. Whenever I’ve tried going on a diet, it just makes me think about food all the time. I like food, I enjoy eating – but dieting just makes eating into a chore. And I never seem to lose weight: my health drives have always combined dieting with exercising more, which actually makes me gain weight. The more I talk to other people about this, the more I wonder: has anyone ever successfully lost weight, long-term, through dieting? And is that even a meaningful goal?

I’ve been reading a lot recently about the concept of Health At Every Size (HAES). What HAES says, basically, is that everyone has a size that they naturally “level out” at; that long-term weight loss is not an achievable goal; and that weight is not actually a reliable indicator of health or fitness. It is possible to be “overweight” and healthy, just as it is possible to be skinny and unhealthy. The latter is certainly true for me: my experiments with dieting are a fairly recent development, as until my early 20s I pretty much ate what I wanted, never exercised, and didn’t gain weight. Sure, I couldn’t climb a flight of stairs without getting out of breath, but so what – I wasn’t fat, so obviously wasn’t unhealthy. That was how I thought of it, and that attitude was backed up by literally everyone around me.

I’m still not what most people would call fat, but as I get older I am getting heavier. My pot belly, big bum and wobbly thighs are getting more obvious. However, I’m also fitter than I’ve ever been. I walk regularly, have been learning to swim, and even go to the gym from time to time! Although I’m still not as fit as I could be, I’m much more active and feel much healthier than ever before. So does it really matter how much I weigh? And is dieting really going to do me any good?

I’ve decided that the answer to that is a resounding “no”! Dieting is not good for you. By all means eat well, cook using fresh ingredients and eat plenty of fruit and veg, but trying to lose weight by cutting down calories and/or cutting out certain food types will not do you any good. There’s more on this on a recent article in the Huffington Post, but in a nutshell: dieting doesn’t work, fat people are no more likely to be unhealthy than thin people, and our society’s prejudice against fatness does more harm than fatness itself.

Because long-term weight loss is impossible for most people, all that dieting does is lead you into a cycle of diet -> lose weight -> put weight back on -> diet again -> repeat. This is referred to as “yo-yo dieting”, it is what happens to most people, and it is phenomenally bad for you. Among other effects, yo-yo dieting puts you at greater risk from heart attacks. The more I read about this, the more I am sure that the years of yo-yo dieting contributed to my sister’s death from a heart attack, aged 41, last year.

So: no more diets for me. Instead, I’m going to keep up my more active lifestyle, eat well but not worry about it if I feel like scoffing a pizza followed by a chocolate cake of a friday night, and learn to love my body the way it is. And I’m throwing away my scales

I am aware that all of the above will actually be pretty easy for me. After all, I have a naturally slim build, so am a recipient of what is known as thin privilege. Because I am perceived as thin, people will most likely applaud me for not “obsessing” about diets and weight loss. People won’t look concerned, and say “but haven’t you thought about the health risks of staying so overweight?” People won’t question my meal choices, and criticise me for eating something unhealthy. And that isn’t fair. It’s not fair that I can make the decision to stop worrying about my weight without really facing any negative consequences, when so many other people (particularly women) can’t. So, as well as deciding for myself to stop worrying about weight, I am also making the following pledges:

1. I will stop saying, about myself, “I feel fat” or “OMG, I’m such a fatty” (particularly when eating), or “Do I look fat in this?”
2. I will refrain from commenting on other people’s food choices, either positively (e.g. “Aren’t you good, having a salad!”) or negatively (which I hope I didn’t do anyway, but will make more of a conscious effort to avoid in future!)
3. I will call out other people for making negative assumptions about fat people, or assuming that fat=unhealthy

Anyone else decided to ditch the diets? Anything you’d add to the above?

Number of books read

I read 80 books this year, significantly up on my 2010 and 2011 totals! Not sure why it’s so much higher to be honest – maybe I just read shorter books?? Sadly I didn’t think to keep track of the lengths of the books I was reading, so that’s just a guess…

Books read by month

I thought it’d be interesting to see how my reading fluctuated throughout the year. I can’t really think of anything that would explain the whole pattern there! I know the dip in May/June is because that’s when my sister passed away, and I really struggled to concentrate on anything so didn’t read much. The dip in August I think is because I was on holiday with my family then, so spending more time being sociable than reading! Besides that, the other peaks and troughs are a mystery to me.

Male vs female authors

Proportionally, the amount of books by female authors vs those by male authors hasn’t really changed – I’m still reading more male than female authors. That doesn’t surprise me: I don’t consciously notice the gender of authors when browsing, but I suspect that more men than women are published over all, so I would expect that most readers would see a similar balance.

Fiction vs non-fiction

Again, not a surprise! I read a few more non-fiction books this year, but still not nearly as many as fiction. I have read some good non-fiction this year, but the fact remains that it just doesn’t grab me like fiction does!

Sources of books

Once again, am happy to see that I’ve actually not spent that much on my reading – this year, three-quarters of everything I read came from free sources!

Mount TBR Challenge

Last year, I set myself the challenge of reading 40 books from my TBR pile by the end of this year. As part of the challenge, I was also supposed to not buy new books for the whole year. That part…didn’t really work out! I just can’t help it, I love buying books! Still, most of them were from charity shops etc, so I’m not going to feel too guilty about that.

I almost completed the challenge: I managed to read 35 books from my Mount TBR. Not bad, only 5 off my target! I thought I’d have a quick look at the books I read in 2012 against what year I first got them. Given that I was supposed to be only reading books acquired prior to January 2012, I don’t think I did that well…

Ah well. I don’t think I’ll be doing any more reading challenges in 2013 (apart from my annual read of the Booker shortlist) – I found it took some of the fun out of reading, feeling like I “had” to be reading certain books. I’m glad to have made a bit of a dent in my TBR pile anyway – Now I can start building it back up again!

2012 Reading Highlights

1. Best Book of 2012: Always a tough one… I’m gonna go with Bring up the Bodies

2. Worst Book of 2012: Atomised. Hated hated HATED it!

3. Most Disappointing Book of 2012: That’s tough, I don’t really feel disappointed by anything I’ve read this year. There’s been a few I haven’t enjoyed, but they were ones I didn’t have high hopes of to start with, so I don’t know if “disappointed” is the right word to use! I guess Umbrella, as I do expect a Booker prize shortlisted novel to at least be readable, but I couldn’t get more than 30 pages into this!

4. Most Surprising (in a good way) Book of 2012: Dreams from my Father. Really didn’t expect a politician’s autobiography to be so honest, and moving.

5. Book You Recommended the Most to People in 2012: The Knife of Never Letting Go

6. Favourite New Authors Discovered in 2012: Chris Nickson (great books, and he’s a lovely chap too! He’s on Twitter), Deborah Levy, Madeline Miller

7. Most Hilarious Read of 2012: Good Omens, which I re-read in preparation for World Book Night

8. Most Thrilling Unputdownable Read of 2012: The Knife of Never Letting Go. Read it in one sitting!

9. Favourite Cover of a Book You Read in 2012: Dark Matter. Perfectly captures the spirit of the book

11. Most Memorable Character of 2012: Kitty Finch, from Swimming Home

12. Most Beautifully Written Book of 2012: This is a toss-up between Swimming Home and Song of Achilles – totally different books, but equally beautifully written in their own ways!

13. Book That Had the Greatest Impact on You in 2012: The Wisdom of Whores – totally changed my understanding of AIDS as a public health issue. I really can’t recommend it highly enough.

14. Book You Can’t Believe You Waited Until 2012 to Read: The Dispossessed – this was a close contender for the “greatest impact” question above, actually! Had never read any Ursula Le Guin until last year actually, now it’s a bit of a “where have you been all my life!!” kind of situation!

Well, I hope that was at least slightly interesting to anyone other than myself! Happy new year all, and happy reading

Once I started reading it though, I actually got quite into it. I think it helps that although it’s promoted as “the President’s autobiography”, it isn’t really – Obama wrote this when he was a young man, fresh out of law school, and had yet to enter politics. He claims that he hadn’t even considered going into politics by that point, and I’m inclined to believe him. I don’t think he’d have written a book this honest if he had an eye on the Presidency one day.

Rather than a standard politician’s autobiography, Dreams is a reflective exploration of one young man’s relationship with his family, history and race. If the writer hadn’t gone on to become President of the United States, this would still be an interesting read: an honest, often moving account of growing up as a mixed race child in a white family in first Hawaii, then Indonesia; returning to the States and spending his young adulthood attempting to understand his racial identity; forging a career as a “community organiser” in deprived neighbourhoods in Chicago; and finally travelling to Kenya to find out about the father he never really knew, and his extended family in Africa. It’s a good read, and a well-written one – this kind of writing can easily become mawkish, but it never falls into that trap.

But of course, this isn’t just any man’s writing. It’s impossible to keep from your mind the salient fact that the young man writing this, the man who is by turns angry, empathetic, confused, saddened, and optimistic, grew up to become the most powerful man on the planet. If you read Dreams without knowing that, it would be an interesting but probably unremarkable read. Reading it with that knowledge though, it becomes extraordinary. I kept wondering throughout how much of what Obama wrote in this book still holds true. Does he still have the same opinions? He talks a bit about how one of the problems facing poor, predominantly black neighbourhoods is that the best and brightest within the community inevitably move away, moving onwards and upwards to better jobs and more expensive neighbourhoods, and stop trying to improve things for those they grow up with. He mentions feeling guilty for that reason when he left his job as a community organiser in Chicago to go to law school – I wonder if that stayed a concern as he went into politics? After all, he’s about as far away now as it’s possible to be from the people he was trying to help back then!

One thing that stands out strongly throughout the book is Obama’s empathy. That’s apparent all the way through as one of his strongest characteristics, and is probably an effect of his upbringing. His account of his childhood, first in Hawaii, then in Indonesia after his mother married an Indonesian man, is striking in its diversity. You get the impression that the young Obama saw much more of the world, and of people in different cultures and different social classes, than most of his contemporaries. I couldn’t help thinking of Mitt Romney, and how utterly uninterested in anyone different from himself he seemed in the recent US elections – and also drawing a parallel with our (in the UK) current cabinet of millionaires! I’m not going to comment on Obama’s presidency here, partly because I don’t really feel qualified to, but it did strike me that this should be a prerequisite for anyone running for government, in any country: an interest in how people live, in all walks of life. Obama clearly has this, and I suspect that has been key to his electoral success: people pick up on the fact that he actually understands a little about their lives.

But this blog isn’t about politics, it’s about books! Judged purely as a book, I think Dreams is very good. I’m not sure it would have quite the same impact if it hadn’t been written (unknowingly or not) by a future US President, but it’s still a memoir with plenty of interesting things to say on race and class, in America and globally. It’s also one of the few autobiographies I’ve ever managed to finish – usually they bore me to tears, so the fact that I finished this in a mere week or so speaks very well of it!

Verdict: 3.5/5

Todd Hewitt is the only boy in a town of men. Ever since the settlers were infected with the Noise germ, Todd can hear everything the men think, and they hear everything he thinks. Todd is just a month away from becoming a man, but in the midst of the cacophony, he knows that the town is hiding something from him — something so awful Todd is forced to flee with only his dog, whose simple, loyal voice he hears too. With hostile men from the town in pursuit, the two stumble upon a strange and eerily silent creature: a girl. Who is she? Why wasn’t she killed by the germ like all the females on New World? Propelled by Todd’s gritty narration, readers are in for a white-knuckle journey in which a boy on the cusp of manhood must unlearn everything he knows in order to figure out who he truly is.

I really cannot recommend this book highly enough. I’m almost reluctant to write this review as I don’t want to give too much of the plot away: it’s so carefully constructed, with so many shocking moments that you really need to experience as Todd does to feel the full force of it.

Todd is a fantastic character. I really didn’t like him at the start of the book, he comes across as angry and aggressive, but through the course of the book he really develops as a character. It’s one of those wonderful character arcs that feels so natural you don’t really notice it happening – only by stopping and comparing the Todd at the end fo the book with the Todd at the start did it really hit me what a different character he’d become.

I also absolutely loved Todd’s dog, Manchee, despite starting the book rolling my eyes at the thought of a talking dog as one of the main characters! Manchee won me over pretty quickly though, partly because his dialogue is so, well, dog-like. His Noise does sound exactly the way you’d imagine a dog would sound if you could hear their thoughts. His personality was wonderfully apt too: a bit dim, cheerful, easily distracted but loyal and tenacious when needed – that should all sound fairly familiar to any dog owners!

Writing about the talking dog like that might make this sound like a bit of a silly read. It isn’t. It’s dark, and scary in the way that the best YA books can be, and frequently, shockingly violent. It also ends on a proper cliffhanger – I’m determined to complete my Mount TBR challenge before the end of the year, so I can’t read the next two yet, but I certainly will do as soon as my self-imposed book-buying ban is over!

Without saying too much more about the plot, all I can say is: read this. Read it if you want a tightly-plotted, fast-paced thriller (I read it in a day because I couldn’t put it down!) that also has intelligent things to say about conformity and masculinity, loyalty and betrayal.

I’m glad I finally got around to reading this though, as I did really enjoy it. Although it is still hard work at times (McCarthy’s abhorrence of punctuation and other dialogue markers doesn’t make it easier, either!), it’s not nearly as heavy going as Suttree – I haven’t read any more of McCarthy’s books, but I’m lead to believe that not many of them are as hard to read as that one was!

The one thing I struggled with a bit though was separating out in my mind this book from the film adaptation. The Coen brothers have been almost slavishly faithful to the source material – certain scenes are just plucked from the book verbatim. I commented to my other half when I was a couple of chapters in that it wouldn’t have surprised me to find out that the Coens hadn’t bothered with a screenplay at all, but had just given a copy of this book to the whole cast!

So I’m finding this a difficult book to review. I really enjoyed it, but would I have done if I hadn’t already seen the film? Would I even have followed this if not for the film? I really don’t know.

This book is incredibly bleak – which I like, but if you prefer your fiction a little cheerier then I would say avoid! The story is simple enough: everyman Llewlyn Moss stumbles across the scene of a drugs deal gone wrong, and takes a briefcase filled with money. From that point, he is pursued relentlessly by amoral hitman Chigurh (a genuinely terrifying character – sorry to keep harping on about the film but Javier Bardem was absolutely perfectly cast here!). Llewelyn’s story is interweaved with that of Wells, the sheriff who is always one step behind Chigurgh. Wells is the moral heart of the novel, but ultimately shown to be powerless.

It’s not a happy story, and it doesn’t end well – indeed, it’s fairly clear very early on that it can’t end well. I liked the sense of inevitability throughout it: I couldn’t help rooting for Llewelyn, even though I knew it was futile. The writing is impressive, if occasionally a little hard to follow. I usually have little patience for novels where the dialogue is written in vernacular, but McCarthy does this so well that I actually stopped noticing – it was just what the characters sounded like.

I’ve decided not to give this one a rating, because while I think I loved it, I can’t decide whether I’m judging it on its own merits or that of the film adaptation. I’m genuinely really struggling to separate the two. Very odd – have never had this experience with reading a book having previously watched the film!

I’d be interested to hear from anyone who has read this but not seen the film, or read the book first. What did you make of it?