Wow. I'm sorry it's been such a ridiculously long time since my last post. My vacation in Ireland was fantastic! I always love it there but it's extra special when you get to share the experience with friends you love. Most of the month since I got back has been dedicated to finishing the Anna shawl KAL which was hosted over at
http://www.ridiculousknits.blogspot.ca/ - it was a challenge for me, but a gorgeous knit and I had a lot of fun with it. This is it, blocking on my bed, looking way too gorgeous to be accused of sucking away 6 weeks of my reading life.
As for my Man Booker challenge, well, it hasn't been going so great! I managed to read one novel during my holiday, Stanley Middleton's "Holiday", which was really no holiday. Irony, yes? This novel would probably have been quite sad and even a bit depressing if I had felt enough of a connection with it to care even a little bit about the characters, but I didn't. The protagonist walks out of his marriage but has no place to go, so takes a holiday at the resort town his family visited when he was a child. While there he reminisces about his father and the relationship he will never have with his own son, while dealing with his in-laws attempts to reconcile him with his wife. It's really a novel about grief and how we process it in different ways, told in a series of flashbacks, but because the main character is in such a numb, dissociative state of mind I found it really difficult to connect with him.
On the flight home I started reading David Storey's "Saville" - an absolute brick of a coming of age novel. If I'd been reading a physical book rather than an eBook I'm certain I would have found it's size quite daunting. It's a semi-autobiographical novel about the son of a coal miner growing up during WWII in a small village in England, dealing with his family's pressure to make the most of the opportunities he has been given and his own desires to be a poet, and it's very beautifully phrased. Unfortunately it seemed like nothing actually happened in the story, other than his growing up. There were lots of opportunities within the story for a little added plot but... nothing happened. I enjoyed the novel, but I was disappointed with that.
Now I'm reading Ben Okri's "The Famished Road" - I'm only about a fifth of the way into it, but it feels a bit like a cross between Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children" (the way I would've loved for it to be written, really fantastic!) and "Saville" - a young boy growing up in a magical world within our own. Only, kind of not quite. Time will tell if I love it or not, but hopefully not too much time. My goal is to be finished it by Monday. There are lots of interesting looking books coming up on the list, and I want to get to them!!
Happy reading!
