Books etc

I have mostly been reading...

Night Road by Kristin Hannah

This book may not be particularly original or high brow but after finding it in our fiction section at work I decided to pop it ahead of the queue as it was just what I was after. Some gripping escapism. It features some teenagers, twins, love and a tragic accident. I read it in four days. It's books like this that get you back into the habit of reading and I fully intend to tackle something a bit more meaty (Bolano?) next.

I read Night Road in the space of a few days after spending a few months getting to the end of We had it so good by Linda Grant. It isn't that I didn't enjoy this book - because I think I did - it had me questioning life and the universe and the paths our lives may take one day - but I think I found it hard to warm to the characters. An American and an English girl meet at Oxford, marry and have children and grow old. I quite liked the part where their children proclaim that their mother and father must make up the stories of their youth up to entertain them as they couldn't possibly be true. Everybody was young was upon a time. and Everybody still feels young, no matter their age. I can't imagine what I will think when I look back upon my younger years. I can't imagine how I will feel... When I was younger I was obsessed with how books were never an actual representation of time and this used to really bother me. As if all I wanted was a book that took twenty years to read in order to depict twenty years of life. I think I mainly felt jealous about how in a book something boring could be over in a matter of sentences but in real life the same laborious event dragged on for whole hours. I spent most of my youth wanting to be older and I guess I got what I wanted.