'S' - JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst

We are always told not to judge a book by its cover.  This is sometimes given as a fairly broad piece of advice telling us not to judge things upon face value or on a purely aesthetic level, and on other occasions it is much more simply that, just because a publisher hired a talented cover artist, it does not necessarily follow that the author has actual talent and/or readability.  This advice is genuinely good and I wish that more people would take notice of it; to judge to quality of a person’s character on the attractiveness of their face/size of various body parts is patently ridiculous and I like to think that most of us realise this.  There is a sizeable problem with it sadly – I like pretty things.  I like to be able to look at my book shelf and be filled with that wonderful sense of wonder and superiority when I acknowledge that I am a proud owner of many beautiful books.  Recently, however, the bar was raised in this field with quite possibly the most stunning book that I have ever held: the rather unassumingly named S.

S is a collaborative work written by J.J. Abrams (yes the guy that is in charge of Stars Wars and Trek) and Doug Dorst (not really famous at all).  Attempting to explain this book is really a rather complicated task as it is really two books within one single tome.  The backbone of the story is a story called ‘The Ship of Theseus’ supposedly written by a mysterious author called V.M. Straka.  This is the story in the traditional sense in that it is written in chapters in the place where you would expect the story to lie.  Yet in reality this is not where the true narrative lies: it exists in the annotations and messages shared between two people in the margins of the story.  It is their story that is most interesting, and it is this that makes this story truly special.

So this is a standard page in the book. As you can see there is the traditional text in a standard typed form and the annotations in the margins. The sections in cursive are written by the girl, Jen, and the ones in capitals are by the guy, Eric. The colours are also significant the notes were not all written in one sitting or one read-through. So the bits in blue/black are the first chronologically with the orange/green coming next and so on. 

Now this makes this story a rather complicated one to read.  Do you read the main story first? Do you read them together?  Do you ignore the main story and just focus on the annotations? Personally I just focussed on the annotations.  Initially I tried to read both at the same time but I quickly worked out that the main story was really just a vehicle, a taxi really that provides a launch-pad for the story of Jen and Eric.  Their story is also two-fold.  The first is academic, to find out who V.M. Straka was. Straka seems to be a figure who makes Salinger look like David Beckham and there is apparently considerable debate as to who he was.  The elusive Straka also was involved in some distinctly shady events during his life and he left a dark legacy that places both Eric and Jen in considerable danger.  Added to this, perhaps predictably for something written by Abrams, there is a love story as Jen and Eric gradually fall for each other.

In addtition to this are the inserts. Every now and again you will find a little something place between the pages of the book.  Sometimes its a letter written between Eric and Jen, something too long and personal to put in an annotation.  Othertimes its a newspaper cutting or a postcard.  One time it is a not written on a napkin.  These are my personal favourite things; they are what makes this book so beautiful and special.  These inserts turn the book into a little treasure chest and add a sense of wonder to the joy of reading.  It reminds me of reading those little pop-up books as a kid, when the story would come alive in a very visual and tactile way.  Except now I'm old - but it's still awesome!

The production quality of this book is sensational - it truly is a beautiful thing to behold.  The effort that the publishers have gone to produce everything to do with it is remarkable.  The story of Jen, Eric and the pursuit of Straka is told in a wonderful drip-drip manner, keeping most of the information back while hinting at it through the mixed-up chronology.  It is a truly unique reading experience, and one that I am sure I will revisit very soon

9/10

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13 Little Blue Envelopes - Maureen Johnson

Anyone that knows me will tell you that I am not a picture of heroic masculinity.  Put me in any situation that involves typically manly pursuits (jar opening, Nazi fighting, press-upping, not crying at musicals) and I will fail faster than Starbuck in a sanity contest (kudos to all that get the reference).  My taste in literature has often been criticised for its girliness not to mention my taste in music, interior decoration and alcoholic beverages, yet even with this propensity, I found my latest book a little challenging.

13 Little Blue Envelopes is a book written by Maureen Johnson and actually by now it is pretty old.  Well actually that isn’t really fair but it was published in 2005 which is, for me, a long time ago – especially given the fact that I usually review books written within the last few years.  Maureen Johnson is famous(ish) to those of you of an American persuasion but I had not heard of her at all until very recently.  My introduction into the world of American Young Adult fiction (largely avoiding stories involving teen vampires) first took me to the world of John Green and through his books I discovered his amazing Youtube channel that he runs with his brother Hank called the ‘Vlogbrothers’.  Now many of you will be intimately familiar with it and will be screaming at me HOW DID IT TAKE YOU THIS LONG TO FIND OUT ABOUT IT??? Well to those people I can only say, I was probably busy playing Football Manager, because that is probably an accurate summary of most of my free time as a teenager.  Anyway (this post is taking even longer than usual to get to the point), through them I was introduced to Maureen Johnson’s books and after some brief Amazoning (surprised that isn’t a verb yet) I decided to start with 13 Little Blue Envelopes.

This is a story about an American girl called Ginny who receives in the mail 13 envelopes, from her recently deceased aunt.  Her aunt is a classic bohemian arty type who has eschewed the rather conservative nature of her family to go gallivanting around Europe.  The first of these letters gives Ginny a credit card with some money and tells her to book a flight to London, leaving all electronic devices behind.  She can only bring one rucksack and can’t bring any maps/guidebooks etc with her and has to open each envelope only after accomplishing each task contained in the previous one.  This leads her on a crazy trip around Europe, seeing her visit, amongst other places: London, Edinburgh and Paris.  The trip itself is a journey of discovery for Ginny in two ways: learning about the life of her aunt and also finding out more of who she is and what she can do whatever misgivings that she may have.

Now, this book is very clearly not marketed at me – I mean it is more closely marketed to me than say a 70 year old ex-navy veteran with a penchant only for whisky and stories involving hard-core nudity – but even so I am clearly not the intended audience here.  My first clue really should have come from the cover.  Generally books aimed at boys are a little less pink (though to be fair she is grasping her thighs in a rather suggestive manner...) The point is that this book is meant to be read by girls like Ginny Blackstone: nervous, timid 14 year old American girls who are trying to find out who they are and want nice boys to like them.  I can’t blame Maureen Johnson for this, those people make up about 80% of the standard readership of YA books.  Normally this is not much of a problem.   I mean I was never an American girl but I can at least identify with the nervous timid bits and even if I could not, the human imagination is a wonderful thing.  Good books manage to appeal to a wide readership, giving everyone no matter who they are a little thing to grab hold of and identify with and the problem with this book is that it doesn’t quite manage that.  The major problem is found in the middle of this book where Ginny falls rather hopelessly for a university drama boy called Keith.  She falls in love in much the same way that Juliet falls for Romeo – hopelessly without much regard for finding out anything about him – and it is at this point the book starts to develop some severe angst, which, in my view, came dangerously close to ruining it.  A little romantic tension is fine, but this was very stereotypical girl-angst, familiar to anyone who has ever been on Myspace (a reference that anyone who wasn’t born between about 1987-1993 is unlikely to get).  This got in the way of what was a rather interesting story and threatened to turn it into something that more closely resembled Twilight fan fiction.

Luckily, this was only a part of this story and it did have many other excellent features.  My personal favourite was the description of Ginny’s time in London – and this is where this book not being aimed at me actually comes full circle and becomes an advantage.  Any Londoner will be familiar with the hilarity that is American tourists.  You can spot them a mile off normally as they are invariably 1) Lost, 2) Wearing shorts in inappropriate weather, 3) Wearing walking-trainers, 4) Loud.  Now Ginny is not all of these things but she rather superbly acts the part of tourist in my city.  She gets baffled by Tube ticket machines (seriously I see this all the time and I have no idea why it is so hard to understand), confused by Harrods (I’m actually with her on this one) and confused by how Ribena works (I had no idea that squash could confused people but apparently this is a real confusion for some non-Brits).  Her experience as a tourist in all these cities, not just mine, made me laugh a lot and in general this was a very funny book, mostly intentionally.

I find that Young Adult books normally – more than other genres – tend to contain significant life lessons; something edifying for its predominantly teenage audience to ponder over after finishing.  This story is mostly about self-belief and finding that there is much more to yourself than you may give credit for.  Ginny spends most of the book saying how she wishes how she was ‘more interesting’, that she had more ‘stories’.  Now this is despite the fact that she followed her aunt’s instructions throughout the book without question, some of which were really quite dangerous in retrospect.  While the teen girl-angst was present, that was not the dominant force of the narrative (thankfully) and it is this part of the story that I most enjoyed.  This was not a moral that was stuffed down your throat.

6.5/10

Favourite Quotes

“She was standing in the airport of Copenhagen, staring at a doorway, trying to figure out if it was (a) a bathroom and (b) what kind of bathroom it was. The door merely said H.
Was she an H? Was H "hers"? It could just as easily be "his". Or "Helicopter Room: Not a Bathroom at All”

“I like you because you were mad. And you're pretty. And pretty sane for a mad person.”

"No shoe should be judged by its footprint, for the foot has a print of its own."

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A Captain's Duty - Richard Philips and Stephen Talty

I have a longstanding distrust of memoirs. I generally feel that they are rather clever ways that people find to make money off bragging about themselves.  I also find that they are frequently heavily ghost written, especially if they appear to have been written within a couple of months after the author achieved something of great note.  A classic example of this is Bradley Wiggins’s autobiography which came out *cue shock and astonishment* a few months after he won the Tour de France and Olympic gold and just in time for Christmas.  Reading it was akin really to listening to a publicist with a few more swear words, it was dreadful.  Exceptions to this rule tend to come from people who have a background in media or in writing in general.  These include the autobiographies of Stephen Fry and Tina Fey both of which are full of home-truths, self-reflection and are genuinely interesting reads.

A Captain’s Duty therefore should have set off all of the alarm bells. This is a memoir written by a man with no background in writing, which was originally published a year after the hijacking which provides the backbone of the story and it even credits the ghost writer, Stephan Talty.  The only time that a ghost writer gets such a prominent credit is when he essentially wrote the entire thing.  Nonetheless I thought that I’d give it a go.  Afterall it has pirates, a thrilling rescue and Barack Obama – what more could one want in a book?

For those who are not familiar with the background to this book I shall provide a short synopsis.  In April 2009 a cargo ship captained by Richard Philips was captured by Somali pirates.  The ship’s crew and its captain managed to engineer the situation so that the pirates only escaped with the captain himself aboard the ship’s lifeboat.  Therein occurred a stand-off between these pirates and the US navy which was ended when navy SEALs stormed the boat, killing the captors and rescuing Captain Philips. Hooray!

Now for the sake of argument I am going to assume, with a pinch of salt, that what the books says is broadly true.  There have been numerous suits by members of Philips’s crew that the book contains not so much facts as a huge tin of whitewash, acquitting Philips of charges of incompetence and even collusion with the pirates.  It is not for me to make a judgement on that, I shall let the great legal minds of the US deal with that.  However, I will say that this book very quickly irritated me as very quickly the author started bragging.  He presents himself as this macho authority figure who rose from the wrong side of the track to become the ideal family man as well as leader of men.  His wife loves him, his children worship him, and his men respect and fear him. His account of what happened on the boat reads very much like a film script (shockingly it has now been turned into a film starring Tom Hanks) and really it seems to be an exercise in the author crawling up his own backside and giving it a good licking.  It does all seem too good to be true.  There is very little introspection and what self-admonishment there is is severely played down.

That is not to say that it is not a well-written book.  It paced very well and contains plenty of action.  There are parts of it that really do seem like they come from a film script and the scenes are easy to imagine and relate to.  It’s odd because this seems like a really negative review when actually I did quite enjoy much of the book.  The issue I have with the book is, however, extremely pervasive and gets in the way of me being able to, in good conscience, recommend that you buy it.  If, having read this, you feel that you can get past the issues I describe then by-all-means give it a go.  You’ll probably like it.

5/10

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