What are you reading these days? | Page 35 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

Anyways, I’m now onto 

Ok, I finished this last night, so review time:

Plot: ‘All Things Must Pass ‘ covers 6 years in the life of Leslie from her early teenage years to adulthood in 1974-1980. As the novel begins we learn Leslie’s mother Grace suffered from various mental illnesses and committed suicide, this understandably leaves Leslie rather upset and unstable. Her father, Arthur decides to pack up their bags and move the pair to New York, where Leslie is to live with her aunt and uncle while Arthur sees another girlfriend. Leslie is shunted to-and-fro as her life keeps on changing, through the course of the novel she moves from place to place, gains and loses friends and family and becomes more and more confused as to who she really is- the only thing remaining constant in her life being her love of music and in particular George Harrison .

The Positives: The book in general has a decent plot. It was easy enough to pick up and the majority of chapters (while some felt like clunky, filler), went fast enough. Character development of Leslie was pretty extensive as we see her mature from a silly 14 year old girl to a reasonably-sensible 20 year old.

The Negatives: (Oh boy, where do I start?) I have a first edition of this novel which is published by a very cheap (and what appears to be a scam publisher) PublishingAmerica. The number of typos is overwhelming, of the 280 pages or so in this novel, every 2nd page had some kind of error in it, mainly the skipping over of prepositions and word order issues. Towards the end of the novel, one paragraph repeated. 

– Leslie was an annoying character. She complained about almost everything and everyone and I don’t think not once throughout the novel did she ever experience any moment of happiness, everything is rubbish in her eyes and she is a real pessimist. She also continuously makes stupid as hell decisions. At one point her step-mother Beth, searches through Leslie’s letters than she sends to her friend Barbara- letters containing personal thoughts etc. Leslie decides to never write a letter again in case Beth searches through them again making Leslie lose a lot of her friends because she never replies to their letters- just keep the letter on your person at all times until you send it girl, jeez 

– The naming of characters. Leslie calls nearly every. single. person. by their first name including her parents, when I was reading the second chapter I kept on thinking “who is Arthur, that she keeps on talking about? Sure only her dad is in the car—-oh wait”. Obviously there are people who call their parents by their first name but I can’t think of many 14 year olds who do it. 

There are also characters with very similar names in the novel which could be confusing. Two prominent couples in the novel are Tim and Linda and Tom and Linda- for God ‘s sake, how could you think that was a good idea? Luckily, Tim and Linda appear in the first half of the novel and Tom and Linda in the 2nd half. However, the second Linda’s name keeps on changing between ‘Linda’ and ‘Pamela’- at one point Tom will be talking about Linda and then he’d say “Well I think Pamela….” 

-Leslie’s and her friends way of talking was so embarrassing, it was as if someone who had never heard a teenager talking before decided to try and talk the way they do ‘all hip and cool like’. At what point after Leslie gets an on-and-off-again boyfriend she tells her friend “Well I might as well tell you. Chuck and I became lovers”………..became lovers……………………………………became lovers?!? Who the hell says that?!? And her friend replies “”With your home life I can understand who you would need to feel close to someone”……………don’t worry just regular 19 year olds here nattering away about our loverboys >.>

-The ending is very rushed and clichéd, it just goes “everything was crap up until the last page AND everyone lived happily ever after. The End “.

Rating  out of 5- it would be one and a half apples but for this paragraph that I laughed at and that I mentioned above with the stepmother looking through Leslie’s letters:

“I found a letter today in your room”.

“You mean the letter I was writing to Barbara?” That was folded up in my drawer!”

“It was laying on my dresser.”

“No it wasn’t! You’re lying”

“Don’t you dare accuse me of lying! You’re in enough trouble as it is- calling us ‘your family’ in quotation marks- and those filthy comments you made about that teacher and that long-haired weirdo who was in The Beatles”.

*ASJ scoffs*

Overall, I wouldn’t recommend it- if a lot of the printing errors was amended it could be pushed up to a 2.5 apples book but no more than 3. If you find it for a very, very cheap price than I’d get it for giggles but I wouldn’t spend more than €3 on it. 

I am reading 3 books at the minute:

^ But the original Irish-language edition not the translation. If you ask any person over the age of 30, what made them hate learning Irish in school, they’d probably say this book. It’s an old woman recalling the stories of her past on the Blasket Islands, a group of islands off the south-west coast of Ireland. They are nearly all very depressing and she rants about how crap life was back then.

BUT it’s still pretty interesting.

Another Steinbeck, I’m only 50 pages in but I’m loving it so far. It’s my last Steinbeck on my bookshelves 🙁

And finally

^ I’m enjoying this a lot, there’s nothing revolutionary in it (so far at least, at the minute I’m on his 1975 letters, so I’m getting near the end) but it’s still an insightful and interesting read into the amazing-character than John was. I picked this off the shelf because I felt my other 2 novels were pretty heavy Doc and I needed something relatively light and fluffy that I could breeze my way through and this was it.

I also haven’t read a proper Beatles book in quite a while so it’s nice to get back to that period in music history that I know and admire so much 🙂