Greg Egan - Quarantine
This was a loan from Andrew B, in response to a mass-emailed request for recommendations of first person present tense writing; it hasn't turned out to be particularly useful or illuminating from a 'learning the craft of first person present tense writing' perspective, but where it did prove effective was in blowing my mind a bit with its play on ideas surrounding wave function collapse and quantum mechanics generally, and 'working through' of some imagined implications (cosmological genocide, anyone?).
Audrey Niffenegger - The Time Traveler's Wife
Dear reader,
Let me tell you what I did a few Saturdays ago, viz: woke up, felt a bit under the weather, saw that Wei was reading The Time Traveler's Wife, decided to read it, read it (yeah, that's right - all in one rather long session and with a certain amount of skimming to find out what happened next and rather in a haze but still).
And? And it's good - it made me want to keep reading, and it got to me. I still think that it's basically a marginally more clever take on the chick-lit thing (not particularly more emotionally clever, but certainly cleverer from a craft point of view), but I understand what all the fuss was about, and thanks to my direct response rather than in any particularly distanced way. Nice.
Also, by way of a historical document, an extract from an email, NV to me, 19/6/06:
I think I need to have a talk with you though Mr Choo regarding your bold pronouncements regarding the written word. Actually just so you know, the following tirade by me is given to you with love rather than anger and is prompted not by Kite Runner buy by the Time Traveller's Wife.
I understand that you are a student of literature and therefore are very worthy of making the bold pronouncements, but I worry that by branding a book (as you sometimes do) before you read it, you go to it with a preconceived notion of what it will be like and this skews your later interpretation. Why not come at it with a cloudless mind, take the journey, and see how you feel as a result. Any pronouncements you make after the fact I am sure will be more accurate of your own experience.
[...] literature is art and one purpose of art is to make you feel, and if you come to art with a notion of how other people felt, you deny yourself your own true feeling.
M J Hyland - How the Light Gets In
Carry Me Down was unexpectedly excellent - it gripped me and got a bit under my skin when I read it last year. Re-reading my impressions of that other, I'm fortified in my response to How the Light Gets In, Hyland's debut novel: it's not quite as skillfully crafted as Carry Me Down, nor (commensurately) quite as good, but it's much like it, particularly in the impression that it leaves - faintly unsettling, maybe, but also more something else on which one can't easily put one's finger...
