Spinning Yarns

My reading lately has been based on the purely for pleasure principle: moving at a delightful snail's pace through my Collected Causley, dipping into all sorts of bits and pieces and pieces and bits of the mighty Peter Ackroyd in The Collection and spinning out Yann Martel's The Life of Pi for as long as I decently could without losing the story-line. As long as I could, proved to be for about a week until tonight. I've just finished, in fact.

There's a quote from some reviewer in the blurb saying that as soon as you finish you immediately want to re-read Martel's Booker winner, but it isn't so for me. I found it fun but can't honestly say it struck me as having huge depth. I've noticed that a lot of students seem to like it, and I think that's appropriate somehow. A really well-crafted introduction to the world of fictive games, but that's about it for me. (Mind you, that in itself is quite a lot. And I don't mean the comment about students to sound patronising. I just think that certain books, many very fine ones, seem particularly well-tuned to that readership.)

Oh, and I should add I had a rare old time with an old, huge favourite, prior to embarking on Pi's voyage. I finally found the Library of America edition comprising four of Philip K. Dick's novels of the sixties and fell in love again with the alternative history of The Man in the High Castle. Nobody has ever done it better. And Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is in there too! Yowza!