This Year's Reading
#58 Everything Is Sinister by David Llewellyn
Read for review for Strange Horizons.
#59 The Edge Of Reason by Melinda Snodgrass
Read for review for Vector.
#60 Boy Meets Girl by Ali Smith
Another well written but ultimately disappointing installment in the Myths series from Canongate. Churlishly I don't like it because it is too much of a myth. Eve's Alexandria had a roundtable discussion of the novel and I find myself in agreement with Victoria Hoyle:I'm not sure though that it really did enough to explore the myth at hand - like Atwood and Winterson (very much like Winterson) I sometimes felt it was more about parallels than something fresh. And is saying, 'Look, the myth has a similar resonance for us today as it did then' by rewriting it, exciting enough, or ambitious enough to warrant a novel? The Myth series is going to get old, pretty quickly if that is all there is at the bottom of it.
Also, as various commentators mention, everyone in the novel is a charicature. Unlike coalescent I don't think this makes it sexist but I do think it makes it a lot less interesting than Smith's other work.
#61 Junky by William Burroughs
A very odd book by a very odd bloke. This was clearly written as correspondence and no attempt has been made to turn it into anything other than dispatches from the frontline. Mostly the point of the book is it got there first. The world of mid-Twentieth Century junk is remarkably quaint from the vantage point of this century. Junkies score from doctors who write them dodgy prescriptions and make money by rolling lushes.
What is so odd about Junky is the combination of candour - such as the frankly bizarre couple of pages when he goes from declaiming fag bars to picking up a man for sex to trying to kill him to drinking himself unconscious - with a massive veil over his personal life. It is a shock when his wife appears unannouced halfway through the text because she has never previously been mentioned. The result is an strange, uneven fictionalised epistolary autobigraphy.
#62 A Maiden's Grave by Jeffery Deaver
I picked this up from a box of secondhand books knowing it would be preposterous and lo and behold it was. With every novel he writes Deaver seems to be having a competition with himself to make it as ludicrous as possible.
Read for review for Strange Horizons.
#59 The Edge Of Reason by Melinda Snodgrass
Read for review for Vector.
#60 Boy Meets Girl by Ali Smith
Another well written but ultimately disappointing installment in the Myths series from Canongate. Churlishly I don't like it because it is too much of a myth. Eve's Alexandria had a roundtable discussion of the novel and I find myself in agreement with Victoria Hoyle:I'm not sure though that it really did enough to explore the myth at hand - like Atwood and Winterson (very much like Winterson) I sometimes felt it was more about parallels than something fresh. And is saying, 'Look, the myth has a similar resonance for us today as it did then' by rewriting it, exciting enough, or ambitious enough to warrant a novel? The Myth series is going to get old, pretty quickly if that is all there is at the bottom of it.
Also, as various commentators mention, everyone in the novel is a charicature. Unlike coalescent I don't think this makes it sexist but I do think it makes it a lot less interesting than Smith's other work.
#61 Junky by William Burroughs
A very odd book by a very odd bloke. This was clearly written as correspondence and no attempt has been made to turn it into anything other than dispatches from the frontline. Mostly the point of the book is it got there first. The world of mid-Twentieth Century junk is remarkably quaint from the vantage point of this century. Junkies score from doctors who write them dodgy prescriptions and make money by rolling lushes.
What is so odd about Junky is the combination of candour - such as the frankly bizarre couple of pages when he goes from declaiming fag bars to picking up a man for sex to trying to kill him to drinking himself unconscious - with a massive veil over his personal life. It is a shock when his wife appears unannouced halfway through the text because she has never previously been mentioned. The result is an strange, uneven fictionalised epistolary autobigraphy.
#62 A Maiden's Grave by Jeffery Deaver
I picked this up from a box of secondhand books knowing it would be preposterous and lo and behold it was. With every novel he writes Deaver seems to be having a competition with himself to make it as ludicrous as possible.