Lime's Book Reviews

[LimeGreenLegend 4,297]

I'll be posting short reviews of books I read here, mainly so I have somewhere to put down my thoughts.  I've just finished my first book of 2019 so I'll start there.

Brighton Rock by Graham Greene (1938)

Hale is a reporter who knows he is going to be murdered.  He hangs out in the crowds of Brighton Pier for safety.  There he meets Ida Arnold, a kind, caring woman who can see he's in trouble but doesn't know why.  After being separated for only a moment he is killed by Pinkie, leader of a gang based around the racetrack, in revenge for the murder of his mentor.  This happens within the first few pages and launches you off on a brutal tale of murder, obsession and damnation.  

Pinkie believes he is clear and free after murdering Hale, but in trying to cover all his tracks he gains the attention of Rose, a sixteen year old girl who works in a cafe.  She notices some things that could lead to Pinkie getting in trouble, so he pretends to like her just to keep her quiet.  Rose falls totally in love with Pinkie to a tragic degree, made all the worse with the constant abuse and manipulation Pinkie puts her through.  But he needs her around, because you can't make a wife testify against her husband.  Their marriage in this book is one of the most sad and pathetic ones I've ever read about, both of them showing their youth and ignorance in not knowing what it is you're supposed to do when you're married.  Pinkie is only seventeen (the author always refers to him as 'The Boy' when not using his name) and the only mentions of his parents in the book are when he remembers their weekly love-making session in the corner of the room while he tried to sleep under the covers of his own bed.  

Meanwhile, Ida Arnold is making her way around Brighton, asking questions, putting all the pieces together.  Pinkie and his gang notice her and start panicking.  This all leads to more bloodshed and betrayal that I don't really want to spoil here.

This is a fantastically written book, the tension is built up perfectly to the last few chapters all the way from the start and it never lets up; there's not a single chapter of filler in the thing.  The three main characters are also brilliantly fleshed out and real.

Pinkie is such an unlikable main character; he's morally corrupt, violent, jealous, petulant, manipulative and a whole host of other nasty things.  But all the way through Greene never forgets that he is just a Boy.  He cries when he's threatened by older, richer gangsters, he knows nothing about the world outside of the racetrack and the pier, and he is violently scared of his own virginity, his and Rose's wedding night being the main catalyst for the third act of the book.

Rose is an innocent, almost pathetically so.  She falls for Pinkie in a second and her faith in him never lets up, right up to the last sentence of the book which kinda broke my heart.  You're always rooting for her to get out though, Greene never makes her too soft, just when you think she's totally gone there's a brief glimpse of hope.

Ida Arnold is my favourite character, she becomes a self-appointed detective after the murder of Hale in the first chapter.  She is like an unstoppable force in this book, always pursuing Pinkie, never relenting.  She also offers a good counterpoint to the very Catholic Pinkie and Rose.  Where they talk about 'Good and Evil' Ida is more concerned with 'right and wrong'.

Like I said, this is a grim book about grim people doing grim things, but it's written with such beauty that it makes it a joy to read, even if the main takeaway of it seems quite depressing;  people don't really change.  You may think they can but their nature is written through them, like a stick of Brighton Rock.

Loved it.  9/10

There is also an excellent film based on the book starring the late, great David Attenborough, and another not so great remake from a few years ago, but we don't need to talk about that.

 

Edited January 5, 2019 by LimeGreenLegend

[Guest]

Thanks for this! I've been meaning to get on my Kindle and start reading, too!

[Con 5,719]

I wish I could get into reading novels. I just can't. Barrack Obama read 30 books this year....I didnt pick up 30 magazines. But who knows maybe one of these reviews will change that in 2019. 

[LimeGreenLegend 4,297]

25 minutes ago, Con said:

I wish I could get into reading novels. I just can't. Barrack Obama read 30 books this year....I didnt pick up 30 magazines. But who knows maybe one of these reviews will change that in 2019. 

There's a book for everyone out there dude, it'll find you eventually.

[Con 5,719]

18 minutes ago, LimeGreenLegend said:

There's a book for everyone out there dude, it'll find you eventually.

I do have a fave book and I read this all the time : 

 

[LimeGreenLegend 4,297]

@Con awesome! What's your favourite circle of hell?  

[Con 5,719]

14 minutes ago, LimeGreenLegend said:

@Con awesome! What's your favourite circle of hell?  

The 5th Circle...it just has something cinematic about it more than the rest. 

[LimeGreenLegend 4,297]

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon (1966)

This was one I had to concentrate when reading, not that I didn't end up enjoying it in the end, but it was hard to follow.  One morning Oedipa Maas receives a letter informing her that she has been named executor of the will of a former lover.  This leads to his stamp collection, which in turn leads to a secret society, which leads to a play about sixteenth century letter delivery, which is entwined with the secret society and everyone she meets is strange and most of them end up dead by the end.  

I really liked Oedipa, the main character.  Much like Ida Arnold, from Brighton Rock, she becomes a detective out of necessity, through which she finds out things about herself relating to her relationships mainly, especially with her husband, even though he doesn't appear in the book very often.  

This was a harder read also because of the style in which it was written.  It's totally a product of its time; mid-sixties Californian counter-culture, LSD and free-love (both of which are at least mentioned in the book) pot smoking teenagers etc etc.  This is reflected in the postmodern almost stream of consciousness style it uses, like James Joyce or Virginia Wolfe, (the plot, to me, felt almost stream of conscious-y, one event leading on to the next almost at random) but if you work with the text you'll get a lot out of it.

I just want to leave a passage of the book here, because it is quite beautifully written:

"She had heard all about excluded middles; they were bad shit, to be avoided; and how had it ever happened here, with the chances once so good for diversity?  For it was now like walking along matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless.  Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.  In the songs Miles, Dean, Serge and Leonard sang was either some fraction of the truth's numinous beauty (as Mucho now believed) or only a power spectrum.  Tremaine the Swastika Salesman's reprieve from holocaust was either an injustice, or an absence of a wind; the bones of the GIs at the bottom of Lake Inverarity were there either for a reason that mattered to the world, or for skin divers and cigarette smokers.  Ones and zeroes.  So did the couples arrange themselves.  At Vesperhaven House either an accommodation reached, in some kind of dignity, with the Angel of Death, or only death and the daily, tedious preparations for it.  Another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none.  Either Oedipa in the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero.  For there was either some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy America, or there was just America and if there was just America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia."

Short and confusing, but it does some really good things (like Tom Cruise) 7/10

Up next is The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan.

Edited January 14, 2019 by LimeGreenLegend

[Spinnaker1981 974]

I have a request:

 

Richard Bachman´s - The long walk.

Tell me what you think.

 

I just read it and I enjoyed that one immensely!

@LimeGreenLegend

Edited July 6, 2019 by Spinnaker1981

[Spinnaker1981 974]

@LimeGreenLegend still waiting for your response!! ?

[Con 5,719]

I hope you don't mind me posting this here as I don't want to start a thread for the books I have read as there aren't very many. lmao. If its cramping your thread, just let me know, pal! @LimeGreenLegend

Not so much a book review and more of a short tale...

I dug up my old book since a lot of people are just learning about The Night Stalker thanks to the Netflix Documentary, i havent watched it yet. But I know all about it.

Being a horror-hound and a big fan of Friday the 13th, I naturally would gravitate to true crime books and learning about real life Jason Vorheeses in our society. That led me to the library where I would discover such personalities as John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, Nikolai Chikaleto, and Ed Gein. I would read all about their deeds and they always spooked me. But when I came across Richard Ramirez, there was something that popped off the page, I always associated it with his love for Satan, there was something more sinister inside Richard, as he did what the other killers did not do....SUMMON THE f*ckING DEVIL! Now the Son of Sam, Adam Berkowitz claimed that a demon would talk through a dog instructing him to kill. But Richard actually did rituals to summon Satan and really felt Satan looked over him and you know, sometimes it seemed like Satan himself helped Richard from getting caught because towards the end of his killing spree, Richard had began getting sloppy and him neglecting his hygiene as junkies usually do, is what began the start of the end for him.

Anyways, I was fascinated by the entire story and wanted to learn more about the guy with the guts of steel and twisted courage that Richard possessed, don't freak out, what I mean by that is, here was a killer who would target homes at random not knowing who would be home or if the homeowners even had dogs in the house...again, he believed Satan helped him in finding the right homes. I then came across this book. 

Fast forward a few years after I bought the book and now I was moving in with three childhood friends who were renting a house in a really nice neighborhood, in an extremely low crime rate town, kind of the exact opposite of the town the four of us were from. Two of them were landscapers, so by 5am they both were out the door. The third roommate was self-employed so he never had a set schedule. It was rare that I was the first one to get home in the evenings, so by the time I got home, I did not need to use the key to the front door cause someone was always home and our living room had huge windows that allowed us to see whenever a car drove up to our cudle-sac. As long as you were in the living room, you could always see when someone was near our property. 

I had been living with them for about two weeks when I was supposed to sleepover at this girl's house but like at 2am I changed my mind and decided I was going to go home because my roommates and I had planned a breakfast cookout (we smoked a lot of weed, you see) and I could just wake up at home. So I get to our front door, it was about 3am by then. I go put the key in and realize the door was unlocked....as if no one locked it. I walked inside and no one was up, everyone was asleep upstairs where our rooms were. I figured the boys got home drunk and forgot to lock the front door. I would address that in the morning. Next morning I bring it up and all three of them tell me that they ALWAYS leave the front door unlocked because "IT'S A NICE NEIGHBORHOOD." You can imagine how much i educated them about Richard Ramirez ,The Night Stalker that morning. I taught them how he would drive for miles and miles just to find "NICE NEIGHBORHOODS" to break into...how The Night Stalker's work would be made extremely easy by homeowners leaving windows and doors UNLOCKED!! I went into my stuff and brought out this very book that I still have to this day, THEY ALWAYS LOCKED THE FRONT DOOR after that day, I made sure they did.  Anyways, thanks for reading my drivel. I recommend this book if you want to scare the p*ss out of yourself. I recommend this book if you have begun to feel safe in your new neighborhood. I recommend it if you have to be reminded about just how precious life is and how we cannot make it easy for serial killers to turn us into a statistic. 

The Night Stalker: The Life and Crimes of Richard Ramirez...5/5....A must-read for true crime fans and people that want a full picture of what elements need to come together to produce a person like Richard Ramirez. I will warn you, what you will read is pure evil and it may stay with you. 

People, this is the reason why I can tolerate the slasher, horror, and Gore films. Once you have read real accounts of murder and you see graphic violence in films, it's still shocking but tame compared to something from real life. This book is also another reason why when asked for a name when I was creating my own GTAV Crew...the name I chose was, Death NightStalkers. (The NightStalkers was already taken, such a waste. lol)

Here are some pics from the book:

Edited January 21, 2021 by Con

[Con 5,719]

On 7/27/2019 at 4:39 PM, Spinnaker1981 said:

@LimeGreenLegend still waiting for your response!! ?

I think he lost his library card, mate.