Stuart, A Life Backwards

Stuart, A Life Backwards (amazon link)
Just like the book before this (Boy A) its also been subject to a TV programme and it also has to doom ridden small font. The saving grace tho, is the layout. Its rich with paragraphs, good margins, varying font sizes for featured sections and even the odd drawing thrown in to break things up. With a decent font size this could have been waaaay up in the 4 or even 5 stars, but as it stands its only getting a 3 from me. Stuart is a pretty unique book, covering a life in reverse from nutter to lovable child. Hope plenty of people check this one out. I’ve not read it yet, and I’ve only half seen the TV programme, but I’m looking forward to settling down to it.

Review:
I am reading ‘Stuart: a life backwards’. Its about a documented life of a homeless person told in reverse to the point whereby he went from a innocent lad to a twisted psycho, nick named ‘Knife man Dan’. Recommended reading if you care about people caught up in a world and fighting for a way out. This is a funny, yet informative read, which forces you to care about someone you would normally keep well away from.

Boy A

Boy A
This isn’t a well formatted book. Infact the only reason I bought it, is because its going to be aired on TV shortly and is loosely based on the story surrounding a famous case in the UK involving a couple of child killers. Boy A has shortish chapters and about 250 pages, but that’s all… everything else is standard. Loads of descriptive text with blocky paragraphs throughout… plus my ultimate pet hate, a small font. With a small font everything else is useless, the kerning and linespacing is irrelavant. For me this is a hard read and I know I’ll probably get distracted by something more spaciously laid out… however its saving grace is the tv series, ‘if’ I get to catch it…. I’m sure i’ll continue reading the book, just to keep up with it, otherwise, this book is probably doomed. Keep an eye out for the TV series, if you like it, buy the book.

The Turning

The Turning
Not read this yet, but glanced at a few chapters… and messaged the author… I’ll repost my words here:

Quote:

well guess what? I found myself sat in Starbucks hugging a hot chocolate and flicking through the pages of a little black paperback offered up at the counter. I had time to kill so, what the hell etc. I speed-read through a few chapters and got the jist of it, enough to slow down at all the right points of course And its there that I got a ‘moment of clarity’ as I like to call it. (I get these ‘moc’s from time to time… its my little metophorical ‘lightbulb above my head’ if you will)

It stemmed from reading the way that you wrote ‘fiction’ crammed with ‘faction’. Those little sentences of natural logic and similars, made me think a bit. Y’see I’ve been collecting brain spillage for a number of years, and amassed a fair clumpage fit for no-one cept me and that odd guy in the corner of the pub on a tuesday evening when everyone else has far better things to do etc. It was good to read, and I’m not much of a reader, so thats quite a compliment I think…. oh, or is it? bugger… I’ll carry regardless…

Sooo… anyway… I’m thinking that i’ve been inspired, but in what way I’m not entirely sure… cause its not to write, as I’ve been thinking that for days… and its not from subject matter, cause that would be plagiarism (and Dan Browns already covered that one)… I think its inspiration for a use for all those years of random dribble and theories of me, collected from too many £2.79 bottles of screw top cheap red wine and lying on my back in the middle of the night trying to spot Satellites without my glasses on.

Anyways… I’m losing it I think… either way, I’ve not read the book yet, but wanted to say that I’ll probably buy it and read some more. I find it… refreshing? yeah, thats a good word for it.

End Quote

So there you have it. I bought it, the last one on amazon.co.uk I believe. You can still buy it second hand there I believe. Its not arrived yet, when it has, I’ll fill out all the formatting tags.

Shorty Loves Wing Wong

Shorty Loves Wing Wong
Bit of a late find this one, I was almost out of the shop. 90 pages, half of them pictures of odd looking cat figures in modern poses and humanal(?) situations. Read the back cover and it sounded really good, contemporary and relavant to todays world. Easy on the eye. didn’t notice any thing about the paper (so it was probably average) … a little hardback tho if I recall. The only bad point imo was the standard formating of the text (small font, tight kerning, standard linespacing etc) and a complete absence of paragraphs. One could argue that the ‘chapters’ are only paragraphed sized, but c’mon, a little sentence break in the odd place would have helped people (ie: me) a little. That minor detail prevented it getting a full 5stars from me. However, I’m more than happy to give it a generous 4. Turns out it was written by michael smith who also wrote The Giro Playboy which looks equally as readable.

Streetwise

Streetwise: Stories from an Irish Prison
An easy to read bunch of contemporary short stories. Not many pages. I’ve read one ’story’ from it… and hate the fact they are fiction, cause they are so good I want to believe! However…. tis probably just faction. The paper smells and the font isn’t very good.

The Boy Who Saw True

The Boy Who Saw True
I bought this book and read it…. tho it did take me years to complete. Its short and has a horrible font, the paper is rubbish too, a bit like those Penguin Books, but it isn’t. The paper smelt of mud. The chapter format is in diary form, so its relatively quick to knock through the pages. I bought this based upon a recommendation in Otakers