Some while ago, I bought a paperback book called Reamde, by a US author called Neal Stephenson. Fat paperback, by an author I didn't know. Fiction. I really have no idea why I bought it. But I did.
To revive a word I haven't seen in a while, I found it unputdownable. Thriller, with a tech angle: Reamde turns out to be a mistyping of "Read me", as in read-me file. There really is no connection between the two authors, nor the two books, but I feel the same way about Reamde as I do about Charles McCarry's Old Boys, which come to think of it I picked up and impulse-bought in a similar way, years ago. Strikes me now that the main protagonist of each book is a man, at a certain point in life, certain perspective ... maybe that's it. Not. I also liked Philip Roth's Everyman, neat black hardback, read it again recently, and I'm decades younger than that anonymous - what? Hero?
Now I've bought Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. Big fat hardback this time, just published, well reviewed in the Financial Times. I've developed a habit of living with significant books for a while, significant in the sense that I really want this one to be good, so I haven't started it yet. Instead, while waiting for the moment, I've been reading self-improving books about inner health - notably Gut by Giulia Enders, which has a first chapter titled "How does pooing work?" - so I've developed an understanding of, er, what happens after lunch.
But that's another story entirely. Also recently, out of curiosity: Andrew Vachss, Flood, on my Kindle. A book I read many years ago, almost certainly on a train. A city changed out of recognition; a crime that no longer happens that way, if it ever did; an old-style anti-hero and his old-style sidekicks. What remains is a book about a place and a mindset. But that Manhattan, and all it contained, is at one with Nineveh and Tyre. Lest we forget, right?
To revive a word I haven't seen in a while, I found it unputdownable. Thriller, with a tech angle: Reamde turns out to be a mistyping of "Read me", as in read-me file. There really is no connection between the two authors, nor the two books, but I feel the same way about Reamde as I do about Charles McCarry's Old Boys, which come to think of it I picked up and impulse-bought in a similar way, years ago. Strikes me now that the main protagonist of each book is a man, at a certain point in life, certain perspective ... maybe that's it. Not. I also liked Philip Roth's Everyman, neat black hardback, read it again recently, and I'm decades younger than that anonymous - what? Hero?
Now I've bought Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. Big fat hardback this time, just published, well reviewed in the Financial Times. I've developed a habit of living with significant books for a while, significant in the sense that I really want this one to be good, so I haven't started it yet. Instead, while waiting for the moment, I've been reading self-improving books about inner health - notably Gut by Giulia Enders, which has a first chapter titled "How does pooing work?" - so I've developed an understanding of, er, what happens after lunch.
But that's another story entirely. Also recently, out of curiosity: Andrew Vachss, Flood, on my Kindle. A book I read many years ago, almost certainly on a train. A city changed out of recognition; a crime that no longer happens that way, if it ever did; an old-style anti-hero and his old-style sidekicks. What remains is a book about a place and a mindset. But that Manhattan, and all it contained, is at one with Nineveh and Tyre. Lest we forget, right?