The Lighthouse by Alison Moore - Oh. My. Lord. I thought that 'The Sense of an Ending' by Julian Barnes was good (it won last years) but this is one hell of a book. A man who is newly separated but middle-aged is taking a break and is embarking on a walking holiday in Germany. Whilst he looks back on his life, the woman who runs the B n'B is also contemplating her life and her marriage.
Youve piqued my interest, so I downloaded a sample to my Kindle. Interesting. Promising start, makes me want to read more. Except...
It opens with a description of the main character standing on the deck of a boat, and apparently he's "looking up at the waxing moon".
Gah!
This
really irritates me. For two reasons: a) the author obviously doesn't know the meaning of the word "waxing" (her editor should have caught this) - the moon may well have been waxing but this is information is neither useful nor relevant (nor interesting) in the context; and b) it shows that she's just grasping for an adjective because she feels she needs one there rather than because it adds anything (I'm reminded of Elmore Leonard's ten rules for writing, though it was adverbs rather than adjectives that he proscribed).
Lucky I was reading it on my Kindle, or I might have been tempted to throw the book across the room.
Anyway, if I can get over this minor outburst of petulance, I will definitely give the book a go.
Still need to finish Umbrella first - started well but it's a book that requires alertness and an absence of distractions and I've not had a suitable opportunity to give it my full attention. In the meantime, I've knocked off Grace Dent's How To Leave Twitter (an amusing piece of doggerel that gives a few good laughs but feels like a newspaper column padded out into a book) and in a bid to exorcise the Ghost of Bookers Past*, I'm currently ploughing through Life Of Pi, which has been sitting gathering dust on my bookshelf for some years, so it's about time I read it. The first third, about Pi's early life in India, was a bit of a chore, but the middle third when he's on the boat, is much more fun and readable.
It's no Jamrach's Menagerie though.
d.
*I've read about a quarter of the Booker winners. I'm sure I won't like all of them, but I feel I ought to have read more of them.
