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Books : Breath
Rating: 
- Well written, but not for me
You don't have to enjoy a book to recognise that it is a well written one. Tim Winton's Breath is one such book for me.
Perhaps it was just my lack of interest in surfing, but I cannot say that I was grabbed by the book as a story.
That said, it is wonderfull written in parts and for anyone who finds the subject matter more interesting than me, this makes a great book.
Rating:
- A bit too much surfing
This must be a fantastic book if you're a surfer, but as a layman I found the surf-talk took up too many pages.
Having said that, it did have a lot going for it - astutue observations on the teenage drive for danger, the need to go further, always pushing to the limit.
There were some wonderfully descriptive passages - "the ocean clicked and rattled". But the lengthy descriptions of wave motion as related to surfing were a bit excessive.
The characters were well drawn, particularly the two boys and their mentor, Sando. His wife, Eve also grows as a character through the book.
The first part of the book covers the boys' teenage years but I felt Pikelet's mature years were too rushed and a bit random. I don't want to say too much here but there were certain aspects of his life that I didn't feel fitted.
So, all in all a reasonable read. We discussed it for a book club and it received a mixed response. I'm glad I read it but won't be recommending it to friends.
Rating:
- Ozziecozziedrama.
I've never been to Oz, never surfed (or wanted to), but I enjoyed this enormously. It's well written, apart from the oddity of some of the missing punctuation as noted elsewhere. It's dark, no bright sunlit views of the world here, and some explicit passages, so not for the faint hearted. There are tons of reviews here, what can I add? If you enjoy something a little different to Richard and Judy, you may well like this, if you just like an airport novel, you probably won't, and that's fine.
Rating: - Drifting with the tide
This is the first novel I have read by Tim Winton, so I wasn't quite sure what to expect. We get a novel that on the surface is about surfing, and whilst surfing does make up a significant portion of the novel it is not really what it is about. The book starts and end with loss, caused by autoerotic asphyxiation and it is the loss at the start which causes Pike (our protgonist) to launch into the story of his past.
Pike and Loonie, the local hell raiser in small town Austrailia meet with Sandro and famous surfer and form an unlikely bond. During their relationship with Sandro lots of surfing takes place, and it gets more and more extreeme, but this is used as a means of self dicovery within the book. The dynamics within the three are constantly changing. We find that Pike has limits, whereas maybe Sandro and Loonie don't have the limits of mere mortals...There is also Sandro's wife and Pike's relationship with her is maybe the hardest part of the book.
People will complain about the puctuation in the prose, but you can work out which words are spoken and which ones are not fairly easily - there were a couple of times when I wasn't sure, but none were critical to my understanding of what was happening.
This is a book about loss, courage, limits and surfing pretty much in that order. I liked it but I can understand why poeple would be put off by the subject matter.
Rating: - brilliant
An intense novel about surfing, live and love. The only reason I've given it four stars instead of five is that I felt the ending was weak compared to the wonderful first two-thirds of the book. The descriptions of surfing and being out on the ocean were wonderful and had real sense of atmosphere. Characters came alive on the page and the story fairly rattled along.
So, five stars for the first three-quarters, four for the ending. Definitely one to pick up if you have any interest in surfing or the big blue seas...
- Well written, but not for meYou don't have to enjoy a book to recognise that it is a well written one. Tim Winton's Breath is one such book for me.
Perhaps it was just my lack of interest in surfing, but I cannot say that I was grabbed by the book as a story.
That said, it is wonderfull written in parts and for anyone who finds the subject matter more interesting than me, this makes a great book.
Rating:
- A bit too much surfingThis must be a fantastic book if you're a surfer, but as a layman I found the surf-talk took up too many pages.
Having said that, it did have a lot going for it - astutue observations on the teenage drive for danger, the need to go further, always pushing to the limit.
There were some wonderfully descriptive passages - "the ocean clicked and rattled". But the lengthy descriptions of wave motion as related to surfing were a bit excessive.
The characters were well drawn, particularly the two boys and their mentor, Sando. His wife, Eve also grows as a character through the book.
The first part of the book covers the boys' teenage years but I felt Pikelet's mature years were too rushed and a bit random. I don't want to say too much here but there were certain aspects of his life that I didn't feel fitted.
So, all in all a reasonable read. We discussed it for a book club and it received a mixed response. I'm glad I read it but won't be recommending it to friends.
Rating:
- Ozziecozziedrama.I've never been to Oz, never surfed (or wanted to), but I enjoyed this enormously. It's well written, apart from the oddity of some of the missing punctuation as noted elsewhere. It's dark, no bright sunlit views of the world here, and some explicit passages, so not for the faint hearted. There are tons of reviews here, what can I add? If you enjoy something a little different to Richard and Judy, you may well like this, if you just like an airport novel, you probably won't, and that's fine.
Rating:
- Drifting with the tideThis is the first novel I have read by Tim Winton, so I wasn't quite sure what to expect. We get a novel that on the surface is about surfing, and whilst surfing does make up a significant portion of the novel it is not really what it is about. The book starts and end with loss, caused by autoerotic asphyxiation and it is the loss at the start which causes Pike (our protgonist) to launch into the story of his past.
Pike and Loonie, the local hell raiser in small town Austrailia meet with Sandro and famous surfer and form an unlikely bond. During their relationship with Sandro lots of surfing takes place, and it gets more and more extreeme, but this is used as a means of self dicovery within the book. The dynamics within the three are constantly changing. We find that Pike has limits, whereas maybe Sandro and Loonie don't have the limits of mere mortals...There is also Sandro's wife and Pike's relationship with her is maybe the hardest part of the book.
People will complain about the puctuation in the prose, but you can work out which words are spoken and which ones are not fairly easily - there were a couple of times when I wasn't sure, but none were critical to my understanding of what was happening.
This is a book about loss, courage, limits and surfing pretty much in that order. I liked it but I can understand why poeple would be put off by the subject matter.
Rating:
- brilliantAn intense novel about surfing, live and love. The only reason I've given it four stars instead of five is that I felt the ending was weak compared to the wonderful first two-thirds of the book. The descriptions of surfing and being out on the ocean were wonderful and had real sense of atmosphere. Characters came alive on the page and the story fairly rattled along.
So, five stars for the first three-quarters, four for the ending. Definitely one to pick up if you have any interest in surfing or the big blue seas...