Reading

Since finishing the first draft of the second novel, and somehow retaining the discipline of not diving back into to revise some more, I've made a start on the backlog of books in my to be read pile. First up was Susanna Clarke's Piranesi which I enjoyed a great deal. It was instructive that a paper-thin plot and clear, simple sentences, could produce such a thought-provoking a story and raise all sorts of issues of identity.

Second, was a revisit to James Blish's A Quincunx of Time (1973). These days this would be regarded as a novella: it features only three principal characters and two secondary ones and occupies around 40,000 words. The plot of this, too, is paper-thin, and the core story is almost all told via extended dialogue on issues of determinism and free will. The story isn't without its flaws, and conveniently dismisses quantum mechanics by means of an offscreen McGuffin, but it is nevertheless a good read, even if 'old school'.

The third, that I'm about half way through, is M John Harrison's The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again. I'm finding this one harder going as I get into it. Harrison is a writer I like and admire, and I was looking forward to this, his latest. It has been been widely praised, leading me to wonder is it just me? My issue is I feel the presence of the narrator too strongly, feel that I feel I'm being manipulated into something, bullied into feeling unsettled. I'm not convinced that I like it, particularly as I wanted to be bowled over by it.

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I've started to sketch out little scenes and fragments, mainly as exercises, but knowing they will likely end up as part of something bigger.