radfrac_archive_full

I don't know why I didn't read Life of Pi when everyone else was. It might have been because everyone else was, though I like to think I really did graduate from high school all those years ago. I think I was worried that Martel wasn't going to pull off a difficult thing. There seemed lots of ways it could go wrong.

I think if I had read the book when I was seventeen it could have entered my pantheon of Amazing Books. At twice seventeen, I thought it good -- successful -- which sounds like a dull praise but is a high -- and its images resonant, worth turning over and gnawing at for a few days. It hasn't entered my system, though, as some books do, changing your chemistry forever. I do not seem to have begun believing in god.

In the spirit of fair play I should mention that my critical faculties (such as they are) may still be blunted by physical recovery -- Mark Strand's A Blizzard of One seemed dull and full of unremarkable insights a few days after surgery, but has gained in poetic merit as I have become more alert. An account of my reading may say more about what a recovering brain is like than what any of these books are like.

Have started Gail Tsukiyama's The Samurai's Garden which, as it begins with a convalescence at the seaside, appeals. Various biographies float towards me through the library hold system, kindly navigated by inlandsea -- or borne on her currents we could say, if we were in the habit of saying things like that -- and, let's be honest, we are.

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