George's Marvellous Medicine

by Roald Dahl

Leave it to Roald Dahl to invent a little boy that gets the best kind of revenge against his mean old grandma. George is left alone with the bitter old hag while his mother goes into town for groceries and his father, a farmer, is out in the field.

George is responsible for giving his grandma her medicine at 11 o'clock. Until then, there is still plenty of time for the old woman to torture her grandson by sending him for tea (one spoonful of sugar, no milk), then for extra sugar, then a saucer, then a spoon. When she lets on that she may be a witch, George loses nerve and backs out of the room

He then has an idea to cook his own patch of medicine to serve up to grandma. He goes through all the rooms in the house, throwing every kind of liquid and creme into a huge saucepan - everything from shampoo to shoe paste. To get the color right, he adds brown paint to the brew. When his grandmother has a spoonful of it, she suddenly starts growing, and growing, and growing, until her head breaks through the roof. When she insists that she grew due to her alleged magic powers, George proves her wrong by giving some medicine to a chicken that then grows to enormous height, as well.

At this point, his parents return and while horrified by grandma's appearance, George's father is fascinated by the huge chicken and the marketing possibilities that comes with it. He wants to recreate the medicine with George, but the boy cannot seam to remember all the ingredients and the next patches make the trial chickens' legs or neck grow and - on the last try - shrink completely. The family is ready to give up.

It is then that the mean grandma thinks the family is keeping what she thinks to be tea from her and snatches the entirety of the last patch of medicine and gulps it down. This concoction makes her shrink and shrink and shrink until she disappears into thin air.

7/10

Word!

We Have Always Lived In The Castle

by Shirley Jackson

Constance, her younger sister Mary Katherine (called Merricat) and their wheelchair bound elderly Uncle Julian live on the edge of a small town. A few years back, a tragedy occurred in their house. The entire rest of the family (the girls' parents, younger brother and Uncle Julian's wife) died from arsenic poisoning. The arsenic was mixed into the sugar and the family used it generously over their desert fruits - except for Constance, who never takes sugar, and Merricat, who has been sent to her room without dinner. Their Uncle simply ate to little of it.

Constance was tried and acquitted for the crime and the trio are shunned by the town folk, who wish they would simply disappear. They even made up a small rhyme about the incident. It is tomboy Merricat's responsibility to go for groceries once a week, an outing during which she is given sideways glances and is bullied. Conversations stop wherever she enters. Visits to the house are limited to one woman coming to tea on a regular basis.

The delicate balance gets upended when Cousin Charles visits the girls and their Uncle. Initially he is pleasant enough but soon he starts feeling and behaving like the head of the family. Merricat disliked him from the get-go and wished him away, while Constance is more open to welcoming him into their lives and more patient with listening to his ideas. She does, however, change her mind gradually.

Charles has the annoying habit of smoking a pipe that eventually causes a fire at the house. He brings the local fire department and with it a mob of town people, who all want to witness the dreaded house's total destruction. Much to their disappointment, though, the fire fighters do their job properly. But as soon as the fire is extinguished, the mob starts throwing stones at the house and pushes inside to cause some serious destruction, until a handful of reasonable people get them all to stop and leave.

Poor Uncle Julian, frail even before the fire, dies during the incident. The sisters return to what remains of their house and make the remaining rooms inhabitable again and lock themselves in and shut themselves away, finally, from the outside world.

The people of the town, feeling guilty for their behavior, start dropping off food at the doorstep as penance. The story of the family tragedy drifts more into legend and the house is set to become the stuff of lore, the kind of house children dare each other to go up to.

A most excellent read.

8/10

You Shall Know Our Velocity

by Dave Eggers

Will and Hand (real name: Sven) recently lost their best friend Jack and try to cope with the loss in the only way they know how. Will came into money some years ago (how is never detailled) and they now decide to spend a week to fly to as many countries as possible to hand out cash. They believe their destinations of choice to be sufficiently poor and the people they hand the cash to in need of it.

Due to their last minute and poor planning, they are unable to go to their original first destination, Greenland. The flights are grounded because of heavy winds, so they fly to Senegal instead, where they want to spend about one day and then move on quickly to the next poor nation. However, they get sidetracked almost immediately.

They make up elaborate concepts they don't follow through on. For example, they want to tape money to donkeys with a cryptic message. They expect the donkeys to just stand around unattended, but never find any that fit their expectations. The duo does get rid of wads of cash at times. Once, they put it in the pockets of pants hanging on a clothesline. Then they hand it to a kid they played basketball with. When they get desperate they have cabs drive them around the block and overpay them.

Moving on to the next destination is not as easy as they expected. They are somewhat suprised that there would be no daily flights to just anywhere. Worse still, they are supposed to acquire visa for certain destinations. In the end, they decide on Estonia, via London. There, unsurprisingly, they have similar difficulties.

Their elaborate one-week trip around the world (more or less) ends with them only making two countries. Then Hand has to return to his job in St. Louis and Will has to move on to Mexico for a wedding.

As strange as all of this may sound this is a quite moving books about two friends that cannot quite deal with the loss of their friend and their inability to save him despite their thinking outside the box and the willingness to (literally) give everything they have for it.

7/10

Annual Book Sale

The Shining

by Stephen King

The original plan was this: Watch the Kubrick version of The Shining and then re-read the book. The first time I saw the film was shortly after I had finished reading the novel for the first time and I absolutely hated it. If you have read and loved the book you will understand.

Basically, the film version focusses on about one quarter of the book. Here's the thing, though: it is the other three quarters that set the tone, create the atmosphere and introduce us to the family stuck in the Overlook Hotel. Hence, the film totally misses the point.

Anyway, it turned out differently than originally planned. I though I was just going to read a few pages, knowing fully well that barely any of it would be in the film anyway and then stop before I hit the bits that were. But as it is with Stephen King books for me...once you start you cannot stop. So, I abondoned my viewing plan and have shelfed it until the time the book is no longer so fresh in my mind and I can finally watch that Kubrick thing and evaluate for what it is. This should take no longer than, I don't know, two years....?

This book is fantastic. It is definitely among King's best. It tells of the troubles of Jack Torrance, his alcoholism and the strained relationship with his wife and young child. The boy, Danny, is gifted with what the Overlook's cook Halloran refers to as "the shining". The cook himself has a touch of it, but nowhere near as powerful as Danny.

Danny, at five, knows but sometimes doesn't quite understand what his parents are thinking. He also gets visits by someone or something called Tony. His parents call Tony his imaginary friend, but Tony does much more than give him company. Rather, he warns him of things to come and brings (sometimes terrifying) glimpses of the future. Not fully able to distinguish between what will happen and what could be avoided and absolutely not understanding the power of the Overlook hotel and the spirits that haunt it, Danny has only minor qualms of moving in with his parents. But gradualy, things start to deteriorate and Danny sees spirits (ghosts?) that can, despite initially believing that they will go away if you close your eyes for a bit, actually physically hurt him.

The Overlook has ways of bringing the past back in snatches. Jack spends too much time in the basement going through old newspaper articles that detail the tragedies of the hotel and slowly gets taken over by some entity representing the building. And Jack takes drinks in a full bar that should not be full - neither of people nor of drink.

As the story builds up to its desasterous climax within the hotel, the cook has been called by Danny and desperately tries to make his way through the Colorado snow storms to help him in any way he can.

Gratifying in a way the film could never be.

9/10

Quote. Dave Eggers

Out my portal the plane wing was silver and shining like it would have fifty years earlier, carrying happier and simpler people. All of them smoking and speaking loudly - musically barking every last word - and wearing expensive hats. When did we start flying like this? So cavalier like this? I should have known, but didn't. Hand would know. Everything like that Hand knew, or pretended to know. So many questions. Did the flotation devices really float? Did planes actually float long enough for us to get out, jumping down those wide and festive yellow inflatable slides? And also: Would it be easier to kill someone who was beautiful, or someone who was ugly? What if you had to do it with your own hands, hovering above? I think there would be a difference. And why, when we see a half-broken window, do we want it all broken? We see the shards rising from the pane and we long to knock them out, one by one, like teeth. Questions, questions. Did Vaclav Havel have emphysema, or was I imagining that? Who had emphysema? Someone over there.

from: You Shall Know Our Velocity