The last month of my life has been pretty much dominated by the organisation of a new life. In the next two months I will be legally attached to a new house and a wife.

While turning the pages of the latest book in my project I’ve went through all the rigmarole involved with getting a mortgage, I’ve been working on graphics for various aspects of our wedding, and I’ve spent a weekend with some very cool lads in Cardiff celebrating my approaching wedding, not to mention working on trying to earn a living. It’s not been as stressful as I had imagined and, believe it or not, I’ve still managed to work my way through this beast of a novel (680 pages).

The Corrections

The Corrections was a lot tougher to read than White Teeth. When I got the book in the post I opened it and immediately read the first page to get a feel for it. Uh Oh! I thought. This guy is writing a work of literature here. I got the feeling that this would be a book where you are supposed to take entertainment from the structure of the words and sentences, not particularly the story the words were laying out.

I knew what I was getting myself into though. There is a reason I didn’t pick a book list of Top Twenty Page Turners or Top Twenty Easy Reads. I wanted to do this to be challenged and stimulated.

Again, I’ve been mostly reading this book in my bed before nodding off and also on the train going to work some mornings. I didn’t take it with me to Cardiff on my Stag trip. My guess is that it would have been thrown out the window if I was caught reading it.

I also found a great we app that has been helping me out with my project. I was browsing the ‘featured apps’ in the iPhone app store and I noticed this app. It’s a nice wee motivational tool and provides nice little stats about your reading habits. I’ll definitely be using this in the future. It’s right up my street.

ReadMore iPhone App

The book, in a nutshell, is centred around one family. The mother and father, Enid and Alfred and their three children, Chip, Gary and Denise who are now adults. Each member of the family is dysfunctional in their own way and every last one of them suffers from some varying degree of depression throughout the book.

Alfred, the father, has Parkinson’s disease along with an on-slot of dementia and Enid, much to her denial, is struggling to cope. She decides to have “One last family Christmas” in an attempt to let her family see the deterioration of Alfred and to recover the broken relationships.

Unfortunately these bonds are harder to heal than Enid, in her excruciatingly blind, positive attitude, seems to think. The book takes us into each family members past showing how the bad relationship and, ultimately, bad parenting caused a lifetime of resentment from Gary, Denise and Chip. How little moments in their childhood have effected their whole life.

I kinda enjoyed the book. There were some great parts such as Denise’s back story about starting up her own restaurant and getting into bizarre situation with her boss’s family. I liked how real the characters felt and how, even though they were (for the most part) un-likeable, I found myself relating to them.

The main issue I had with the book was that, for all that happened, it was way too long. Too much time was spent on embellishment of scenes, unrelated characters and insignificant back stories.

I can understand why it’s on the top book lists. It was very well written (from what my uncultured mind could see), and the story was solid. But in the same way I can recognise that Lawrence of Arabia deserved it’s critical acclaim, it doesn’t mean I would want to sit through 3 hours of that again.

My final verdict: 5/10.

Next up is Bad Science by Ben Goldacre.