I will be back to blogging regularly at some point, but that point is still somewhat vague and far away, so please don't hold your breath. In the meantime, I am still reading books, and I will still post my book challenge lists, if only to show that books are indeed one of the great escapes.
Where I stand now:
32 The Bone Clocks - David Mitchell
33 All the Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr
34 Shades of Grey - Jasper Fforde
The Bone Clocks is Mitchell's biggest and bestest book so far. Somehow, he managed to incorporate what made Black Swan Green so great, into the structure of what made Cloud Atlas or Ghostwritten so great. I can't really say that much about it, because saying anything will give away the plot, but I recommend everyone to read it. Although of course you should read all of his other novels first, in the order they came out, because some of his characters (or their parents, children, or siblings) reoccur in several of his novels. Which is just one of the many, many layers to be found in The Bone Clocks.
Then I read All the Light We Cannot See, which won the Pulitzer this year. I am not generally fond of American novels and novelists, and reading this novel, I remembered why. Everything is just a bit too polished, to convenient, there are no loose ends or sharp edges. All the characters fit just a bit too snugly in their little corner of the world, and they have just exactly those experiences and talents and qualities that lead them to be on exactly the right place for the big denouement. Also, the structure didn't really work, with alternating chapters between the male and female protagonists, which didn't quite fit at some crucial points, so then Doerr just put in a repeat chapter of the same character. Pick a structure and stick to it, or don't have one at all; a botched up alternating structure doesn't work. The ending was slightly surprising, until it all became a bit too much Sarah's Key. Just yesterday I listened to someone who had written her thesis on "the Americanisation of the holocaust", which is exactly what happened here, and which maybe something I will write more about in the future.
Finally, I read Shades of Grey, which has nothing whatsoever to do with 50 Shades of Grey, and was published 2 years earlier. It's about a dystopian future, set after Something Happened, and in which people can only see very little colour. There is a ranking according to which colour you can see, with Purple being the highest, and Grey the lowest. This is just one example of the complex, bewildering, and utterly pointless rules in place in this society, which also include regular 'leapbacks', in which perfectly functional technology is cast aside to create a society deteriorating itself on purpose. I loved Fforde's Thursday Next series, and this novel was great fun too. It's the first in a trilogy, with the next novel coming out next year, an if you're into comical dystopianism, it's one to read.
So wildly differing novels, all contemporary, and in varying modes of realism and seriousness. I'll save the classics for when my mind has enough space to properly absorb and digest a piece of good literature, although David Mitchell's novels are nothing less.
