Book Reviews, well, sort of...

Right then. Where was I?

So I’m just about to embark on the final leg of my belated journey to getting a degree. The last course I’m taking is '20th Century Literature: stories, poems and stuff', and there is, as you may imagine - if you squint hard enough and really concentrate - a Waterstone’sworth of reading to be done. And I’ve more or less done it.

In my previous lives, I’ve reviewed records and concerts and TV shows, but never books. Here I shall demonstrate both the stupid amount of books I’ve read recently and also my madd skillz as a literary critic. I’m sure you’ll agree, having read my biting postmodernist aesthetic dialectical breakdown of the set texts that I’m a shoe-in for a ‘distinction’ come next summer.

Lewis Grassic Gibbon – Sunset Song.

Parochial proto-Irvine Welsh. Language seemingly inpenetrable, but if penetrated, very lovely and soppy and a little bit socialist.

Virginia Woolf – Orlando.

Boy/Woman skips through time and into bed. The blueprint for Captain Jack Harkness.

Daphne Du Maurier – Rebecca.

Ooh that Mrs Danvers!

Berthold Brecht – Life of Galileo.

Science and Religion, one of which I don’t understand, the other of which I don’t believe in. I believe I understood this book thing though. Could work well as a play.

Philip K. Dick – Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Only if you put them into ‘sleep’ rather than ‘shut down’. Amazing book – in the sense that it explores some brilliant ideas and concepts yet at the same time it is completely rubbish and is as clunky as a dinosaur in leg-irons.

Manuel Puig – Kiss of the Spider Woman.

Mwah. Reminded me of the storytelling bits in Generation X (good). The plot certainly weaved an intricate web (sorry). xoxo

Abdulrazak Gurnah – Paradise.

Like Lord of The Rings but without the elves and the shortfolk and the talking donkey and the rings, and with more wheeler-dealing, like in Only Fools and Horses.

Pat Barker – The Ghost Road.

Hospitals, War, and random anthropological bits from the South Pacific. I liked the first two strands. The third I just wanted to wash right out of my hair.