[!--QuoteBegin-Conor+Dec 27 2005, 07:57 PM--][div class=\'quotetop\']QUOTE(Conor @ Dec 27 2005, 07:57 PM)[/div][div class=\'quotemain\'][!--QuoteEBegin--]ADRIAN MOLE ROCKS!!!
I really like the series of books and you may call me a cissy, but I can't stop laughing at the new book I got for Christmas, "Adrian Mole and the weapons of mass destruction".
Really worth a try if you like reading at all. Not the most challenging of books but a bit of light hearted banter won't hurt anybody.
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I read
The Growing Pains in school. It was quite funny, and I might pick up one of the later volumes out of interest in the commentary on the contemporary world.
For now, however, I have read
Dark Water by Koji Suzuki (yes, the same guy who wrote
The Ring). I have not seen the film, but from what I know about it, it is only about one part of the book. The book has seven stories, some of which are classic psycho-horror stories, while others are rather drama. Let it be said that there is very little involvement of the supernatural in these stories, and they are all told in a way that they seem likely- they
could happen (although some are a bit too much fantasy for that).
The first story is about a lady and her small daughter who moved into a new appartment and finds a red bag of a deceased child on the roof. She forbids her daughter to pick it up and it is eventually thrown away; only to reappear on the roof. It is also revealed that a family used to live in the appartment whose daughter suddenly vanished two years ago. This is the story the film appears to be based on (although from what I read, it's rather different).
The second story deals with a person who is invited to a deserted island in the bay of Tokyo on which tresspassing is forbidden. He gladly joins, because a girl he met ten years ago was reportedly banned there, bar all clothes and means to survive by a friend of his- or that is what he told before he died.
The third one is about a fisherman who wakes up on one morning and his wife is gone. He can't find her. He eventually decides to give up the search (she'll either return or not) and goes out fishing.
The fourth one is about a yacht expedition that turns bad when the yacht suddenly stops moving, one hundred metres from the shore. The yacht, of course, does not have a radio transmitter on it.
The fifth one is about a fishing ship on its way back home that finds a deserted yacht and is assigned to bring it back to the mainland. The protagonist is sent to the yacht to make sure nothing happens. Obsessed with finding out what happened on the boat, he reads the log.
The sixth one, although it lacks any supernatural involvement, is the least believable one to me. I know what it tries to tell me -and that part is constructed really clever- but the resolution does not work properly in my mind. It is about a theater group and a member who was kicked out of the play and is now a light assistant at the play's premiere. He is sent upstairs because there is a water leak right above the stage.
The whole story falls a bit out of the frame of all others too.
The seventh one is the best in my opinion. It deals with two hikers who discover an unknown caves in the mountains and, against better knowledge, decide to explore it. One of them is later crushed by a falling rock, and the other one is trapped down in the cave with only one possible way out: an underground lake with an assumed connection to the outside.
The stories have several things in common. They all take place in or around the Tokyo Bay and all except one have small children in a more or less prominent role. This is because the frame of the book is a grandmother who tells these stories to her granddaughter -which is pretty absurd to me considering most of these stories are very unsuitable for small children- and they were apparently inspired by things this grandmother found washed to the shore. The last story has an involvement of the grandmother herself, although she does not actively participate in the happenings themselves, therefore it is not clear if the story itself happened the way it did.
Oh yeah, and they all deal with water more or less, but that is pretty obvious.
All in all, it is a great book, well worth reading, both to give you the creeps and to have something to think about.
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