Fractious: I'm Sorry...

...but I just wanted to say:

May the fourth be with you!

(had to be done)

Right now I"m reading...

Then We Came to the End by Craig Brown

I thought this was going to be a belly-laugh funny book. A wry and humourous look at life in the modern office. A sort of Gervaisian foray into the written word. It wasn't.

In fact, it took me at least fifty pages to even begin to head my head around what it was. I was disappointed. I was on the brink of putting it down and starting another. And then I realised - it's like Curb Your Enthusiasm. It's a sort of stream of various consciousnesses (is that a real word?!).

Rather than just having the bumbling and cringeworthy series of mishaps and misunderstandings that populate Larry David's life in front of you, this book gives you several inter-related strands of this happening simultaneously via the cast of characters working in a recession-hit advertising agency.

Once I had that straight I thought it was possibly one of the most interesting, well-crafted, sad, funny and painful books I had read for years. Not least because it is written in a most cunning fashion. There is no protagonist; there is no first person singular voice. The whole book is written from the perspective of the collective consciousness (again, as a 1st class literature student I'm sure there must be a cunning phrase to describe this device, but thanks to the ravages of Merlot and time it eludes me). Everything is us, we and our. It's brilliant.

Apart from the cancer bit. That punctured my balloon that had taken a while to inflate. I didn't see the point of it, it interrupted my bliss, I was irritated. Thankfully it didn't last long and then normal service was resumed.

Try it - you might like it. I thought it was fascinating, if a little tiring, it was about work after all, and you all know how I feel about that...

Books I"ve Finished

Burning Bright - Tracy Chevalier
The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers - Xiaolu Guo
Imperium - Robert Harris
The Book Thief - Markus Zusak
The Book of Lost Things - John Connolly
Miss Garnet's Angel - Salley Vickers
Pies and Predjudice: In Search of the North - Stuart Maconie
And When Did You Last See Your Father - Blake Morrison
One Good Turn - Kate Atkinson
Restless - William Boyd
Blackberry Wine - Joanne Harris
Everything Must Go - Elizabeth Flock
Black Swan Green - David Mitchell
Bedroom Secrets of the Masterchefs - Irvine Welsh
A Spot of Bother - Mark Haddon
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - JK Rowling
The Book of Dave - Will Self
Home to Big Stone Gap - Adriana Trigiani
The Boleyn Inheritance - Philippa Gregory
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
Mother's Milk - Edward St Aubyn
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
In Cold Blood - Truman Capote

Fractious

Sunday, 4 May 2008

I'm Sorry...

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