Wednesday 18 June 2014
Move?
I am pondering moving this blog to Wordpress....
I do love blogspot and I've been using it for years, but Mark and I have been running Butterflies & Bread over on Wordpress for a few months and I am enjoying that platform rather more than this at the moment. Apparently I can import all the content over so I will get investigating, watch this space!
Saturday 7 June 2014
Melrosiad - Some Hope
Back with a newly cleaned up Patrick Melrose this week. Having left behind his troubled 20s, Patrick and I are now pretty much the same age. I think we would get on.
"As far as I know she's driving a consignment of ten thousand syringes to Poland. People say it's marvellous of her, but I still think that charity begins at home. She could have saved herself the journey by bringing them round to my flat," said Patrick.
"I thought you'd put all that behind you," said Nicholas.
"Behind me, in front of me. It's hard to tell, here in the Grey Zone.
"That's a rather melodramatic way to talk at thirty,"
"Well, you see," sighed Patrick, "I've given up everything, but taken nothing up instead."
Monday 2 June 2014
NW
NW by Zadie Smith
Not quite sure what to make of this book. I was looking forward to it for so long and ever since I got in in a buy one, get one half price with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah I'd been waiting for my Norfolk holiday so I could give it my full, uninterrupted attention.
I am a big Zadie Smith fan - both White Teeth and On Beauty were for me the kind of book you don't want to put down, and end up wondering along the road reading, bumping into pedestrians/lampposts/dogs etc. This one made a promising start and sucked me in straight away, but then I felt it meandered off slightly. I did read it fairly intensively over the course of a couple of days and didn't find that a chore at all, but I wonder if I had take a slower approach whether I would have lost interest somewhat.
I really liked the characters and as usual in a Zadie Smith novel they are so believable, it's as if you are reading about real people. I engaged with all of them but for me the underlying connections between them didn't feel strong enough, and each individual story felt disconnected and a little disparate. Perhaps the patchwork of different, and sometimes clashing personalities is the aim, given that it's a novel in which an area of London, rather than a person, is really the star. But I don't know that it made for the most satisfying read.
Still, I enjoyed it a fair bit and would recommend it, but maybe not to a first-time Zadie Smith reader.
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