Last year I began to publish interviews of French authors I like/love, whenever I was able to get in touch with them. Thanks to the Internet and Web2.0 it can be much more easier now.
So I decided to do the same with English and American authors, provided, of course, that I can contact them directly.

Many thanks to Arthur Phillips, the author of Angelica, Prague, The Egyptologist, and The song is you, for playing the game and answering my questions about his reading habits

• What is your favourite moment for reading ?

Sunday mornings, weekend nights.

• What is your favourite place ? (bed, bath, garden…)

It has changed as my work situations have changed.  When I had to go to an office, the subway.  When I was free and easy, the park.  Now, with family and heavy working hours, it’s in bed.

• Do you need a particular atmosphere or situation when you read ? (Music, silence…)

No, I can read anywhere without any trouble.  This is a long habit, from when my parents used to let me bring a book with me whenever they forced me to go somewhere I didn’t want to go.

• What/who does influence your choices ? (friends, family, Internet, media, colleagues…)

My reading list is almost entirely the books and authors that are recommended by the authors I admire.  I read an author (say, Kundera) and then, because I love him, I find out who influenced him (Mann, Musil, Svevo, etc) and then I put all of them on my list.  And so on…

• Do you ever read readings blog in order to find new titles/authors to read and discover ?

I read blogs for criticism, essays, arguments, but my current reading list will take longer than I still have years to live.

• Can you read more than one book at a time ?

Not fiction, no.

• E-book or paper ?

Paper, though I imagine using an e-book someday.  it’s hard to believe I will ever change.

• Bookmark or folded page corner ?

Bookmark.  I love bookmarks

• What are you currently reading ?

As of last night, I finished Philip Roth’s “The Counterlife” and am beginning Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”

• When you don’t like a book do you finish it anyway or do you stop reading it ?

I usually give it at least 100 pages, and then only quit if I sense incompetence.  Not being “interested” doesn’t mean I should quit, usually.  Not being interested means I have to give it 200 pages or so.

• Do you have any idea of what could your next reading be ?

I bought two Tolstoy books at the same time, so “Sketches of Sebastopol” is next.

• Do you consider yourself as an addict ? Do you have a book with yourself in all circumstances, just in case ? Are you afraid of being without a book to read ?

Yes, yes, and yes.

• Have you got a big pile of books waiting for being read ?

I am trying to stop the pile, and add to the list, which I keep in my pocket at all times, in case I finish a book and want to go buy the next one.

• Does your writing influence your readings ? For instance, if you’ve just written a bloody and dark novel, do you need to read a book of a completely different style or do you stay in the same universe ?

I try not to read things that are like the thing I am writing, for fear of unnoticed influences, but even so, whatever I am reading probably has some effect on what I’m writing.

• What are the books/authors/genres you like the most ?

Too many to list, so let’s pick a country.  France?  I worship Georges Perec, and love Flaubert, Proust, Anatole France, Camus, Dumas…

• How did you become a writer ?

Accidentally.  I was working as a speechwriter and an ad writer.  I realized, “I’m writing every day.  It’s easy.  But it’s boring.  I wonder if I could write fiction…”

• Since you became a writer, has the way you read changed ?

Of course.  I am much more likely to examine structure, technique, etc, but I can still be captured, like a child, and get lost in the book’s world.

• Do you have any other revelation about yourself as a reader ? Something you would like to add ?

You must read Perec.  You must read Perec.  Everybody must read Perec!

News

• Last book: In the US, “The Song Is You”, published 4/09.
• Arthur Philips’ Website
• Facebook group for The song is yo

• Author : Arthur Phillips
• Book read in : French
• My review in French : here
• Appreciation : 

Summary
The novel opens in London, in the 1880s, with the Barton household on the brink of collapse. Mother, father, and daughter provoke one another, consciously and unconsciously, and a horrifying crisis is triggered. As the family’s tragedy is told several times from different perspectives, events are recast and sympathies shift.

My review

I discovered Arthur Phillips a few weeks ago and got fascinated by his novel Angelica. I couldn’t help thinking of the marvellous and dark Turn of the screw by Henry James, read a long time ago when I was a teen. Same strange and dark atmosphere, the ambiguous heroine, the potentially molested child, an austere Victorian household.

The novel is told by an unknown narrator, relating to different points of view. First we read the story from the mother’s point of view, then from the husband’s and so on. Each of the character has his own vision and understanding of the story and events, the reader has to build his own interpretation of what he is reading, and, as in The turn of the screw, the author does not end his novel with a crystal clear conclusion. Some may dislike such a process, but I personally love that ! The mystery is not solved, unless you settle your own explanation among those suggested. I find the writing great and elegant, the characters are fascinating and psychologically consistent, the plot is both fluid and twisted, what we think is evidence turns to be much more complicated and weird.

A great discovery, a great novel for the Victorian era lovers, and a clever page-turner for your winter evenings by the chimney corner.

• Author : Christopher Priest
• Book read in : French
• My review in French : here
• Appreciation :

Summary
After a Chernobyl-like accident at a fast breeder reactor on the north coast of France, Britain is shrouded in radioactive fall-out. When her best friend is murdered, a young writer is forced to make sense of the deadly world she now occupies.

My review

I recently discovered this author with The prestige, and fell in love at once, so I chose to read The quiet woman, as I bought this book a long ago.

I don’t quite understand why this book is classified as Science Fiction in my French edition, it is an absolute mystery for me. Anyway, the basic story is really appealing, the characters are interesting, and even worrying. I thought of David Lynch’s films by many aspects, such as waking dream-like narration, surreality, unconscious…We skip from a point of view to another, without really knowing which one is reality. The plot takes place in the British countryside, with the dark shadow of a recent nuclear incident. The subject is botched, the writing passes over so many things that could have enhanced the whole story, that I felt something was missing, like I was reading a draft. An interesting draft, not boring, for I enjoyed reading this novel, but I was disappointed by the unfinished side.

Not a bad book, but for fans only, do not try to discover Priest’s work by this novel.

• Author : Brunonia Barry
  
• Book read in : French
• My review in French : here
• Appreciation : 

Summary
Towner Whitney, the self-confessed unreliable narrator of The Lace Reader, hails from a family of Salem women who can read the future in the patterns in lace, and who have guarded a history of secrets going back generations, but the disappearance of two women brings Towner home to Salem and the truth about the death of her twin sister to light.

The Lace Reader is a mesmerizing tale that spirals into a world of secrets, confused identities, lies, and half-truths in which the reader quickly finds it’s nearly impossible to separate fact from fiction, but as Towner Whitney points out early on in the novel, “There are no accidents.”

My review

I should have loved this book, full of appealing themes such as witchcraft, an old and weird family, an hallucinating heroine, complex family relationships, unexplained deaths and disappearances. Well, I made a huge effort up to the half but was fed up long before I gave up, realising there no action, no captivating plot, nothing that could keep me awake.

I didn’t like the style, due to the translation, maybe, maybe not, I couldn’t tell, but that was enough to put me off. I will skip the details about French expressions that are not even correct French, but I found some dialogues a bit confusing, and the changing of points of view being awkward and clumsy.

The narration seemed full of promise but soon I felt bored, stuck in a wimpy story. Honestly, the characters have a strong background, however, I felt no empathy for them, no curiosity, this family had a great potential but the way the author dealt with it spoiled all the interest of the plot. The style is cold, impersonal, making the characters distant and void. The conflict between the witches and the Calvinists is hilarious and anachronistic, far from being credible. The basic plot was rich an intense, dealing with mental illness, child and women abuse, and a duality between reality and delusion, however, nothing captivating pops up from this rich background. An interesting story that turns out to be a trivial and boring book.

• Author : Cody McFadyen
  
• Book read in : French
• My review in French : here
• Appreciation :

Summary
“I want to talk to Smoky Barrett or I’ll kill myself.”
The girl is sixteen, at the scene of a grisly triple homicide, and has a gun to her head. She claims “The Stranger” killed her adoptive family, that he’s been following her all her life, killing everyone she ever loved, and that no one believes her.
No one has. Until now.

My review

I hope McFadyen will always be a writer and never go mad, he would be a terrific killer !

In this second book of Smoky Barrett series we meet Smoky again, now with a new daughter, Bonnie, still mute after the murder of his mother, Smoky’s best friend from high school. They are both hurt by life and death and live together as a mum and a daughter.

Smoky is now faced to  a new horrid affair, involving a young teenage girl, half-destroyed by a man she called “the Stranger”, claiming that he first killed her parents, then her foster family, wanting to turn Sarah  into a wild beast, with no soul, no hope left.

The story is told both by Smoky, the usual narrator, and by Sarah’s diary. Smoky and Sarah, two women who has to face up to their pasts, trying to survive after an unspeakable suffering. Sarah becomes her own witness, she talks about her parents murder, referring to herself in the third person. She needs to stand back her own story to be able to recount it clearly. Her diary enlightens the investigation, quite entangled and complicated.

We also meet Smoky’s team again, still well-portrayed, endearing and lively, but we don’t learn as much about their life as in the first book, because Sarah is having the leading role.

We can’t help shivering when reading Sarah’s diary, the killer a.k.a The Stranger is particularly perverse, cruel, cold and sadistic. He’s moulding Sarah  into a beast with a mental knife, he wants to show her violence, pain and death, by killing everyone she loved in the most horrid circumstances, and break both her hope and innocence.

Smoky and the reader ask the same question : can we survive such a tragedy, being harassed years after years, witnessing your loved ones being slaughtered.

We can guess the killer’s identity easily, not too soon, but soon enough to spoil the growing tension, however the why is still relatively hard to understand. This point was less powerful than Shadowman that really took me by surprise !

This second book is still a really good one, with an efficient story and great characters, and McFadyen is now one of the few authors whom I will follow the next books !

• Author :
• Book read in : French
• My review in French : here
• Appreciation :

Summary
One night the stars go out. From that breathtaking “what if,” Wilson (Blind Lake, etc.) builds an astonishingly successful mélange of SF thriller, growing-up saga, tender love story, father-son conflict, ecological parable and apocalyptic fable in prose that sings the music of the spheres. The narrative time oscillates effortlessly between Tyler Dupree’s early adolescence and his near-future young manhood haunted by the impending death of the sun and the earth. Tyler’s best friends, twins Diane and Jason Lawton, take two divergent paths: Diane into a troubling religious cult of the end, Jason into impassioned scientific research to discover the nature of the galactic Hypotheticals whose “Spin” suddenly sealed Earth in a “cosmic baggie,” making one of its days equal to a hundred million years in the universe beyond. As convincing as Wilson’s scientific hypothesizing is–biological, astrophysical, medical–he excels even more dramatically with the infinitely intricate, minutely nuanced relationships among Jason, Diane and Tyler, whose older self tries to save them both with medicines from Mars, terraformed through Jason’s genius into an incubator for new humanity. This brilliant excursion into the deepest inner and farthest outer spaces offers doorways into new worlds–if only humankind strives and seeks and finds and will not yield compassion for our fellow beings.

My review

The story is told by Tyler Dupree as an adult, starting off with the end, and is developed through many flashbacks. The mystery and suspense are maintained by this nifty use of flashbacks, we first learn about how the Spin appears, with no much unveiled, and then we progressively get into the past and life of the characters, their childhood before the Spin, their relationships.

Speculation is a great part of the novel, in such domains as politics, psychology, human, social, scientific. That is what I do love in Hard Science books ! How would we react and live if we had the knowledge of the future, if we knew that we have only 50 or 60 years left ? How the men and women born before and during this period would live, think, plan their life ? What about the worldwide economy ?

The main subject is fascinating and very well handled, the characters get by in a weird and disturbing world ruled by unavoidability, where the thirst for knowledge is the only hope. Tyler, Jason and Diane are  interesting and endearing characters, also human, imperfect and realistic. The plot is rich, with complex relationships, and the story turns out to be just amazing, and the finale announces a sequel, Axis, that I hope to read soon !

• Author : Christopher Priest
• Book read in : French
• My review in French : here
• Appreciation :

Summary
Two 19th century stage illusionists, the aristocratic Rupert Angier and the working-class Alfred Borden, engage in a bitter and deadly feud; the effects are still being felt by their respective families a hundred years later. Working in the gaslight-and-velvet world of Victorian music halls, they prowl edgily in the background of each other’s shadowy life, driven to the extremes by a deadly combination of obsessive secrecy and insatiable curiosity. At the heart of the row is an amazing illusion they both perform during their stage acts. The secret of the magic is simple, and the reader is in on it almost from the start, but to the antagonists the real mystery lies deeper. Both have something more to hide than the mere workings of a trick.

My review

My first book by Christopher Priest and I am already in love. I find difficult to label such a book, that takes equally after Science Fiction, victorian-like, and fantasy genres. I had the impression that I was reading a classic book, written in an old-fashion way, classy and genteel.

The story starts nowadays, when Kate Angier meets Andrew Borden. This down-to-earth part tends to become more and more mysterious. All through out the book given to Andrew by Kate, we soon learn more about their ancestors, two rivals, who fought until the end, wanting to be and stay the best of all..

First, we learn about Alfred Borden, an ambitious and talented magician who explains the hows and whys of his ascension, how he became a famous artist in spite of his working-class origins. He talks about his rivalry with another well-known magician called Rupert Angier. The last part of the book (read by Andrew) presents another point of view, with Angier’s diary. Suddenly the story turns out different, some unexplained facts and details told by Borden are partially explained, but the mystery remains. The fantasy part is quite subtle, the book seems still “realistic”, no big effect, no spectacular stuff to impress the reader. We soon understand that this novel is mainly about doppelgänger, in many ways. We have two points of view, different, complementing each other. We easily understand what it will happen, but still don’t know how, the novel is a trick in itself, one of those mentioned by both Albert and Rupert, you know how it will end, but ignore the process.

The author makes the most of such fascinating themes as brotherhood, rivalry, physical and psychological doppelganger, delusion, reality, with style and refinement.

I also recommend the movie derived from this excellent novel, The prestige, by Christopher Nolan with Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman. The plot may have some alterations compared with the book, some could say it is too far from the novel, but it still works perfectly too, a great movie for a great novel.

• Author : Cody McFadyen
• Book read in : French
• My review in French : here
• Appreciation :

Summary
FBI agent Smoky Barrett is no stranger to the darker recesses of the human mind. But nothing could have prepared her for the day she had to watch her husband and daughter die at the hands of a serial killer. She bears the scars, mental and physical.
Most people would run – from work, from life, from everything associated with the pain of a shattered existence. But Smoky doesn’t know how to run – and when the job that has defined her life comes calling once again with the news that her best friend from high school has been brutally murdered, she finds herself back in the firing line, chasing a hidden killer who will stop at nothing to confront her.
Face to face.

My review

I recently received The face of Death, the second book of Smoky Barret series, from the french publisher and soon realised that I had better read the first book before. I’m glad I did !

Shadowman is the first novel by Cody McFadyen, and I am now able to say that I’ll be watching out his next novels !

I really loved the main character, Smoky Barrett who is a strong but so human and emotional young woman. We can’t help feeling empathy for Smoky even when she is compared to the killer whith whom she shares a same taste for blood, and the love for hunting. Each characters are touching and endearing, but I also liked the plot, in spite of its apparent simplicity, because  the author handled it perfectly, keeping us fascinated, until an amazing conclusion.

I had no idea of the identity of the serial killer, the finale is perfect, intense, stunning. A novel with action, but a lot of emotions, profundity, and humanity.

I’m now ready to read the second book.

• Author : Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows
• Book read in : English
• My review in French : here
• Appreciation : 

Summary
January 1946: writer Juliet Ashton receives a letter from a stranger, a founding member of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. And so begins a remarkable tale of the island of Guernsey during the German occupation, and of a society as extraordinary as its name.

My review

Do I need to introduce this unanimously praised best seller ? I’m sure I don’t. Even the French blogs are all won over by this cute and pleasant story. I couldn’t wait to read this book so I ordered the English edition, much cheaper than the French one. I was full of hope and pretty sure I was to love it, for all what I had read about it convinced me. Actually, the first half is really nice, interesting, and even funny. I liked the characters, very different but all are endearing in their own way. It was a good start, however, I suddenly realised that nothing retained my attention, and worst of all, the end of the story was predictable,(I had a confirmation by reading more reviews of the book). The story and plot could have been interesting, thanks to the historical context, but in the end, the novel is too superficial, too corny, too cute ! I haven’t been able to finish it, I very seldom give up on a book before the end, but in this case, I felt like I was wasting my time.