It's All a Blur

I read a lot while I was away. I read White Tiger which won the Booker. It was light and quick but ultimately quite forgettable. Like fat-free Salman Rushdie. I loved Kate Atkinson's Case Histories. It's a mystery genre I suppose but she has such a way with characters and stories that I really enjoyed it. Since my return I read another one of hers. While there Ruth had Scenes From a Museum which I've had unread on my shelves at home forever, I knew I would like it, just never got around to it. It was great, very funny and nasty all at once.

Half a Yellow Sun was all about Nigeria and Biafra and since I know nothing about the situation there it was very illuminating. She writes well and the story was very sad but somehow readable in a way other African stuff isn't. If the horror is too much in your face I find it unreadable. My last book at the beach was Louis de Bernieres' Birds Without Wings, and now I know all about the Turkish/Greek/Armenian thang. I remember reading Corelli's Mandolin by him and loving the richness of his writing. This is quite good too but the central story is not as compelling so it ultimately is not as good a book.

A nice bit however I copied out:

The couple sat side by side on cushions on the floor, quietly eating breakfast from the low table. They munched in happy and enjoyable silence, of the kind that grows like a vine through the long years of a good marriage, so that when everything that needs to be said has already been pronounced, it is mutually understood that there is an intimate silence that has it's own loquacity.

My last book read on the plane was The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley which is a pre-war English story of a young boy visiting a friend in an estate and he ends up delivering secret messages between the young lady of the house and the virile young farmer. Apparently Harold Pinter made a screenplay and it was produced with Julie Christie, Edward Fox and as the 'virile young farmer' Alan Bates. I tried to order it on Netflix but it is not available. It's quite good, reminiscent of the first part of Ian McEwan's Atonement, he is interestingly enough blurbed on the back jacket as having loved the book in his youth. It's also like Lady Chatterley a bit I suppose, without the sex. Oh those virile young farmers!