A Long Way Down

I probably shouldn't be reading a book about suicide at time like this. After all, not so long ago I was struggling with the pangs of a depression where the idea of suicide was an obsession. But the subject of "A Long Way Down" was irrelevant when I bought it. It was Nick Hornby's lastest novel, shortlisted for the 2005 Whitbread Book Award. I had read Hornby's "How to be Good" and "High Fidelity" and I was sure I was in for a good read. He has a remarkable gift for thinking up thoroughly believable and coherent characters going through the kind of bad moments most readers can relate to.

This particular book is about four completely different people who don't know each other and happen to choose the same spot to commit suicide on New Year's Eve. They end up saving each other's lives on that particular night and in the long run. It's a tremendously sad and insightful book that doesn't feel that "heavy" thanks to the author's abundant use of humour (a dark, meaningful and poignant humour, which in real life so often goes hand in hand with an extreme situation).

I highly recommend it.

Synopsis

Narrated in turns by a dowdy, middle-aged woman, a half-crazed adolescent, a disgraced breakfast TV presenter and an American rock star cum pizza delivery boy, A Long Way Down is the story of the Toppers House Four, aka Maureen, Jess, Martin and JJ. A low-rent crowd with absolutely nothing in common - save where they end up that New Year's Eve night. And what they do next, of course. Funny, sad, and wonderfully humane, Nick Hornby's new novel asks some of the big questions: about life and death, strangers and friendship, love and pain, and whether a slice of pizza can really see you through a long, dark night of the soul.

Reviews

Guardian, Times, Observer, Telegraph.

The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail

I read "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" to get better acquainted with the argumentation behind some of the theories in "The Da Vinci Code".

I wasn't disappointed: this 1982 book, followed on from a BBC TV documentary, is a true delight for any conspiracy theory buff. It defends a conspiratorial view of western history: Jesus may have survived the crucifixion and traveled with his wife Mary Magdalene (of royal blood) and their offspring to what is now southern France. There they established what became the Merovingian dynasty, which is championed today by a secret society called the Priory of Sion.

Endless conspiracies throughout the times (all of them deriving from the need to hide the true identity of Jesus and Mary Magdalene) are tacked by the authors.

Personally, I found the theory behind the Protocols of the Elders of Zion scam (that triggered such brutal anti-semitism in Czarist Russia and in Hitler) to be one of the hight points of his fascinating book.

Synopsis

A nineteenth century French priest discovers something in his mountain village at the foot of The Pyrenees, which enables him to amass and spend a fortune of millions of pounds. The tale seems to begin with buried treasure and then turns into an unprecedented historical detective story - a modern Grail quest leading back through cryptically coded parchments, secret societies, the Knights Templar, the Cathar heretics of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and a dynasty of obscure French kings deposed more than 1,300 years ago. The author's conclusions are persuasive: at the core is not material riches but a secret - a secret of explosive and controversial proportions, which radiates out from the little Pyrenees village all the way to contemporary politics and the entire edifice of the Christian faith. It involves nothing less than...the Holy Grail.

Rule of Four

At the centre of this thriller's plot is the very real, very famous and very mysterious book "Hypnerotomachia Poliophili", one of the most important documents of Renaissance imagination and fantasy.

Ian Caldwell's and Dustin Thomason's "Rule of Four" builds on an hypothetical decipherment of the Hypnerotomachia's meaning by two Princeton students.

The book is mildly entertaining without ever really getting a grip on the reader. Its popularity owes a lot to the "Da Vinci Code" phenomenon: romanticized and distorted historical facts shrouded in controversy, ancient mysteries and encryptions have become the latest recipe for producing best sellers.

Synopsis

Tom Sullivan, about to graduate from Princeton, is haunted by the violent death of his father, an academic who devoted his life to one of the rarest, most complex books in the world. Coded in seven languages, the Hypnerotomachia Poliophili, an intricate mathematical mystery and a tale of love and arcane brutality, has baffled scholars since 1499. Tom's friend Paul is similarly obsessed and when a long-lost diary surfaces they finally seem to make a breakthrough. Only hours later, a fellow researcher is murdered and the two friends suddenly find themselves in great danger. Working desperately to expose the book's secret, they slowly uncover a Renaissance tale of passion and blood, a hidden crypt and a secret worth dying to protect...