Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Reading

My reading life is not going so well at the moment. I can't seem to find things that I like to read. I'm re-reading Alasdair Gray now, I love his writing but there must be someone I've never read before whom I would enjoy reading, right?

I read two of Louise Welsh's books, I liked the shorter one, Tamburlaine Must Die, and then I got her first, "critically acclaimed" and "award winning" The Cutting Room, for my birthday. I was really looking forward to reading it and it started out really good. I have a thing for writers who write in the first person of their opposite sex. I think it says something about the writer. Trying to get inside the head of someone of the opposite sex is never easy and to do that convincingly demands a fair bit of imagination and skill. But then the plot got too plotty. Too much bloody plot. Not just stuff happening to characters you've become drawn to, the stuff they say, the things that go inside their heads, but plots. Plots are all about the writer, not about the characters.

I like Alasdair Gray because even though it's always like there's lots of stuff happening in his books, what "happens" is pretty much irrelevant to how much I would enjoy the book. Same with JD Salinger, Haruki Murakami, Chuck Palaniuk, Tim Lott. Okay that pretty much exhausted writers whose books I've pretty much all read and all enjoyed.

But there must be more out there, right? Now where did I put that lastest issue of In-Style again .....

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