DOWN UNDER By Bill Bryson – Reviewed

I bought this book just before going to Australia myself and never got round to reading it. I have to say that although it’s an interesting account of Bryson’s travels around Oz, and his amusing anecdotes offer a little insight into the country, I didn’t really miss much.

It’s an interesting book rather than fascinating. Amusing rather than funny.

The problem is exactly what drives people to read Bryson’s books, their very ordinariness. His adventures (using the term loosely) around Australia were almost as exciting as mine. The places he visited similarly to mine, although I didn’t get to the outback or Perth, I definitely saw more of Melbourne than he did, and my brief trip to Sydney seemed to encompass more than his.

The insights aren’t anything special either. You only have to talk to a couple of Australian and visit their cities to see the issues they have with the Aborigines.

Australia is an interesting and very new and empty country, and you get that idea from Bryson’s book. His travels around the country offer an insight if you haven’t ever been, but it’s much more fun to explore yourself. You’ll likely come to similar conclusions.

Where Bryson’s book does excel is his research. There are some fascinating histories in here amidst the middle-of-the-road traveller’s adventures. He seems to spend every evening in a bar having a beer, a traditional Aussie past-time perhaps, but hardly exciting for the reader.

Down Under isn’t a massive success, nor is it a massive failure. It’s difficult to get excited about the book either way. I neither feel compelled to read another of his book, nor bothered to remember not to.

Unlike a guidebook you don’t feel the sense of exciting of discovery, and Bryson’s mild excitement isn’t really enough to make you want to discover more.

May be this is one of his off books, and may be they’re all like this. I just can’t be bothered to find out.

THE GRAVEYARD BOOK By Neil Gaiman – Reviewed

It’s difficult to review a book like there. And there are so few books like this. Books that you experience, rather than read. Books which envelope you, books which takes you to a new world and let you explore that world and introduce you to new friends.

Books that touch you. Writers that speak to you.

These are rare things. Much like The Thief of Always, The Hobbit, and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, The Graveyard Book is a tale of wonder, of imagination, a coming of age tale of adventure.

Nobody Owens’s family is killed one night when he’s a toddler, and whilst the murderer is searching for him, Bod slips out and finds himself in a graveyard, adopted by the ghosts who live there. But to keep Bod safe from the murderer he can’t leave his new home, and must learn to live the life of a live human within his ghostly confines.

Bod slowly grows up, learning the skills he needs to survive in his strange surroundings, but longing for the life of a live person, without even knowing it.

Gaiman creates a magical world, part Harry Potter, part Tim Burton. The plot follows the trials and tribulations of Bod’s growing up, a simple tale, but with the ever growing presence of the murderer making life all the more difficult for the young child.

Ok, so there are several places where things are nicely slotted into place and then become suddenly important, Bod meeting a witch and then needing her magic to escape after being trapped by a dodgy pawnbroker. But these aren’t glaring, and it’s only those reading this with a critical eye that are likely to notice.

And that’s what I mean by this being a difficult book to review. While you read it you enjoy it, you love every minute of it. You can’t help but feel a tug at the heartstrings every time you put it down, the urge to continue discovering the story made me finish the book in barely two days, despite a full-time job interfering.

This is the kind of book that children should be made to read. Not because they can learn from it, although they will, but because this is the sort of book that makes you feel you have discovered a wonderful, magical world, and will make children want to read more.

The Graveyard Book will no doubt make Gaiman many more fans, and deservedly so. He’s created a wonderful world and filled it with people who you can’t help but love.

Enchanting and beautiful. I cannot recommend this book enough.