While commuting I seem to be going through fads of either reading RSS feeds and writing emails on the laptop, listening to podcasts and music, or reading books.
Last week I took “If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things” by Jon McGregor on the train with me. I picked it up in our local bookshop a while ago, and only just got around to reading it.
While it seems well written, the basis for the story quickly became intensely irritating to me. The entire book tells you about the effect of a significant event on a number of lives that witnessed it - without actually telling you about the event.
While I felt I should have perhaps persevered though it, I jumped from the half-way point to the end - to find out if the “whatever happened” is ever divulged. It is, but is not perhaps the earth shatteringly important “whatever happened” that I might have imagined it to be.
Don’t you just hate it when you are looking forward to reading a book, and it doesn’t meet your hopes and expectations. Mind you - at least it was better than “The Accidental” by Ali Smith that I also started reading last week. It will go down in my memory as quite possibly the worst written book I have ever attempted to read.
I’m rapidly starting to realise that in reading “Anna Karenina”, I have set a very lofty bar for future books to reach.