Books

Since becom­ing unem­ployed I’ve applied for a lot of jobs, wrangled with the job centre, read quite a lot of library books, done some draw­ings (more of that later), tried and failed to do a sour dough bread starter and star­ted freak­ing out about apply­ing for a masters.

Here’s some of the books I’ve been read­ing or re-read­ing. Brief descrip­tions only, because I’m not partic­u­larly in the mood for writ­ing.

The Magic Toyshop- Angela Carter
I’d forgot­ten how much I love this book- I love the creepy atmo­sphere and lush descrip­tions, and Uncle Philip is a great ogre. I want to watch the tv version, but love film doesn’t have the dvd.

Perver­ted by Language- Short stor­ies inspired by the Fall

Each story was by a differ­ent author and inspired by a differ­ent song title- it was a real mixed bag in terms of both qual­ity and tone. It was much better than the simil­ar Belle & Sebasti­an antho­logy I’d read, but some of the stor­ies were still pretty bad though, too much either macho writ­ing postur­ing (all the Bukowski wannabes) or the sort of super-cryptic noth­ing writ­ing much favoured of people trying to make their journ­als sound myster­i­ous. The Stuart Lee one along with a few others were pretty great though, and Michel Faber is one of my favour­ite writers.

Endless Night- Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie books are a kind of comfort food- there’s so many of them and they’re mostly the same. I hadn’t read this one, and when I saw the public­a­tion date of 1967, my heart sunk a little, because the 60s is when she star­ted to go a bit senile and write detect­ive stor­ies that made abso­lutely no sense. It was an extremely pleas­ant surprise though. It’ s a dark psycho­lo­gic­al thrill­er writ­ten in a totally differ­ent style to her normal one, in the first person, that really racks up the creepy atmo­sphere. It reminded me a lot of Engleby, but if I write more, I’ll give away the whole plot. I put the film version on my love film list, it only had 3 stars though.