Two recent reads of mine have been Rabbit, Run by John Updike and Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata.
Rabbit, Run is a book that I've struggled with for years. I was originally assigned it at university and flaked out of it halfway through, then gave it another go at least twice years later. I even own more than one Rabbit book in the series, which I haven't been able to read because I still haven't finished the first one.
Going back to it, I still found it a tough one to break into, but I'm glad I persevered - if only for curiosity's sake at this point. It's a concept I love, a novel about a young guy in his twenties in Nowheresville, USA, who was a hotshot star basketball player in high school. Then he married his sweetheart, had a kid, and now he works a dead end job and just wants to escape. So he does - he runs away, but he comes back almost immediately, and the novel is about how he deals with the consequences.
It's beautifully written but my god, is it brutally bleak at points. I wanted to like it more than I actually did, and really for me a streak of humour shooting through it would have made it a lot more human and a lot more readable. It's pretty goddamn relentless.
By contrast, Convenience Store Woman is simply lovely. Been meaning to read this for ages and finally picked it up. Conversely it's an incredibly easy, quick read, but it's got hidden depths. Beautifully economical, funny (but not too funny, not proper ha-ha funny), and sad (but not too guttingly sad, more poignant than sad, really).
It's a story about a rather odd woman who has worked in a convenience store all of her adult life. That's all. It's a very simple story, and it's an extremely short book. Interesting you said you read Curious Incident recently Prin, as it reminded me a bit of that, although I read that many years ago now. It's a simpler novel than what I remember of that though.
Now I'm reading The City and the City by China MiƩville. My first one of his. Finding this sort of tough going actually. I might be thick but I don't quite know what's going on when he describes stuff going on in the city that seems to be related to it being futuristic. I don't know if I'm meant to or what. I think there's some kind of all-pervasive technology that hasn't been explained.
I like the characterisation of the protagonist though, and it seems like an interesting mystery.
Rabbit, Run is a book that I've struggled with for years. I was originally assigned it at university and flaked out of it halfway through, then gave it another go at least twice years later. I even own more than one Rabbit book in the series, which I haven't been able to read because I still haven't finished the first one.
Going back to it, I still found it a tough one to break into, but I'm glad I persevered - if only for curiosity's sake at this point. It's a concept I love, a novel about a young guy in his twenties in Nowheresville, USA, who was a hotshot star basketball player in high school. Then he married his sweetheart, had a kid, and now he works a dead end job and just wants to escape. So he does - he runs away, but he comes back almost immediately, and the novel is about how he deals with the consequences.
It's beautifully written but my god, is it brutally bleak at points. I wanted to like it more than I actually did, and really for me a streak of humour shooting through it would have made it a lot more human and a lot more readable. It's pretty goddamn relentless.
By contrast, Convenience Store Woman is simply lovely. Been meaning to read this for ages and finally picked it up. Conversely it's an incredibly easy, quick read, but it's got hidden depths. Beautifully economical, funny (but not too funny, not proper ha-ha funny), and sad (but not too guttingly sad, more poignant than sad, really).
It's a story about a rather odd woman who has worked in a convenience store all of her adult life. That's all. It's a very simple story, and it's an extremely short book. Interesting you said you read Curious Incident recently Prin, as it reminded me a bit of that, although I read that many years ago now. It's a simpler novel than what I remember of that though.
Now I'm reading The City and the City by China MiƩville. My first one of his. Finding this sort of tough going actually. I might be thick but I don't quite know what's going on when he describes stuff going on in the city that seems to be related to it being futuristic. I don't know if I'm meant to or what. I think there's some kind of all-pervasive technology that hasn't been explained.
I like the characterisation of the protagonist though, and it seems like an interesting mystery.
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