So, after a Big [undocumented] Trip to America, I'm back in lovely Bristol and turning tradition on its head by beginning with my...
David Wong - John Dies At The End
The internet in book form. If this doesn't give you nightmares, well, you're obviously not a very creative person. 2 stars
Philip Roth - American Pastoral
The swan song of my American literature phase. I bought my copy on a gasping, blistering hot day in Philadelphia in a dozy little bookshop near the public library. I rearranged their Shakespeare section for them. (The shop, not the library, obviously.) Reading this on the bus to New York, I came across a note in the back, reading something like: 'Vienna tomorrow. I am so sick. Prague was nice.' Some idealistic young earnest had taken this to Europe on his Big Trip, and now I was reading it in America, on mine. Poignant. I give it 3.
Rose Tremain - Restoration
One of the best 'voices' I have ever heard come off a page, this diary of a 17th century surgeon turned professional cuckold turned surgeon again seemed oddly familiar as I read it. Then I realised I had seen the film aeons ago. IMDB tells me it stars Robert Downey Jr, or, 'Robair Doonee Joonoo' as my French landlady calls him (he is her favourite actor). A very rare narrator, in that your annoyance and frustration with Merivel increase in direct proportion to your liking for him. And as if one spot-on character wasn't enough, Charles II could be twirling his moustaches enigmatically in your very own living room and he wouldn't be more real than Tremain makes him. 5 stars
- All George MacDonald Fraser's sublime 'Flashman' novels bar 'Flash for Freedom!' and 'Flashman at the Charge.' My fave so far: 'Flashman and the Redskins' but possibly just because it's the last thing I read and therefore the only thing I can remember in any vivid detail. Five of the best. Five Victoria Crosses. Five runs, five smokes, five gulps of whisky, five fast ponies, five smouldering houris, five enormous sacks of cash and five inches from certain death...
A terrible hit-and-miss literary buffet. Someone told me recently, "you're a pick-and-mix dilettante and before you know it you'll be thirty and managing a barnes & noble." They said it was a Simpsons quote but I can't confirm that.
This is the way I cycle to work in the morning (on the days I cycle - it is getting a bit dark for all that now). Here's the Avon Gorge, looking west from the Suspension Bridge:
This is looking east, towards the city:
Certainly wakes you up.
On Saturday we went to St Werburgh's City Farm, in (I think) the nicest part of Bristol and a lovely allotmenty community-minded kind of place. Here are the sheep. I laughed so much, they just sounded like a man doing an impression of a sheep, not like a real sheep should sound at all. Just like someone pretending to be a sheep very badly.
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