I haven’t written something for
this blog every week, so I guess that was an unrealistic idea.
We are going to Samoa for ten days next week, with our lovely house and
dog sitter coming to stay in the house. I’m taking three solid novels to read. Hilary Mantel’s Bring
Up the Bodies is our
book group choice, so we’ll definitely both read that. And there’s Canada by John Ford
and Capital by John Lanchester.
I’ve just re-read Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell and
understood it better this time. Maybe I read it more thoughtfully as some of
its themes relate to the new novel I am thinking about. Not that I could write
anything as clever and complex and this book.
Scifi/fantasy is not a kind of book I read much of these days, though I
have in the past. As an example of a happy reading accident I read China
Mievelle’s Railsea thinking it was one of the three shortlisted book for
the Pullitzer Prize for fiction this year, the year the prize was not awarded.
(David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King was also on that list, and
should have won the Prize.) The actual shortlisted book was Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, which I haven’t
read.
