The Corrections, by Jonathon Franzen

I got this book for free from Amazon last month as some sort of promotion. I never take the free books because I imagine I'll never read them, but this book was something I'd meant for a while to try. Actually, I'd wanted to read it, perversely, because I expected to join the crowd of Franzen haters.
Alas, while I'm not a Franzen fan, I didn't hate the book. My friend had told me I would, but I didn't. It's not a bad book.
The Corrections is the story of a family. It jumps about in place and time but examines their lives in a complex way. It's not the sort of thing I'd usually read but it was pretty wells written, contrary to what I'd been told.
What interested me was that in places it took the point of view of different characters, yet through their eyes we see their flaws, and the good in others. This is the opposite of what one would expected. We seen characters look at others and feel contempt, but the other character's positive attributes, instead emerge.
Yet every character is deeply, irrevocably flawed in this book. They are in need of, as the title tells us, corrections.


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Please excuse typos etc in this and posts in the near future. I'm on holiday and using my iPad to post.

The Man Who Cycled The World, by Mark Beaumont

Being back in Scotland for a week, I decided to read some paperback books that my family had on the shelves as a bit of a change of pace from my usual digital diet of reading material. First up was Mark Beaumont's The Man Who Cycled The World.



I was attracted to this book because one of my New Year resolutions is to start cycling again and I'd like to do some sort of long-distance trip one day. In fact, to be entirely honest, I'd love to cycle right the way around the world, as the author did. By coincidence, Beaumont is also a Scot like me.

The book is interesting for someone like me, with an interest in travel and mildly interested in bikes, and overall it's a pretty good read. However, the author also seems a little hard to relate to. He's obviously rather well-off and although people might say that about me, too, I nonetheless felt disengaged from his "struggle." For me, if you can raise almost $50,000 to cycle around the world, it's not really easy to comprehend your mindset. I'm the sort of person who hitch-hikes and backpacks and I wouldn't even know what to do if I had $50,000 in the bank.

Beaumont does travel cheap up to a point, like me, but he also meets up with masseuses and team members around the world and is always in the phone to his mum. It's not really the sort of rugged adventure that one might have hoped for.

As a writer, too, he is lacking. Not that it's awful, but with his position of privilege, his background, his somewhat arrogant nature, and then his unnatural storytelling method, it left me cold.