I've been reading greedily and saving my blogging for over here, so I thought I'd pop in and share some recent Instagram posts about Kate Atkinson's A God in Ruins until I'm ready for a more sustained instalment.
Of course, you probably already know that you should read everything Atkinson has written, but if you didn't, wouldn't the first paragraph in the excerpt below convince you to give her a try?
I snapped a photo of it to remind myself to annotate it, finding myself with no pencil nearby, and then thought you might like to use the line next time you need to make a speedy escape from social boredom.
In the photo below, I'm telling my Instagram friends what I think of Atkinson, burbling about "what she does with narrative and chronology while never letting go of brilliant storytelling." In each of her novels, the highly popular Jackson Brodie mysteries and the more strictly literary (although I question and dislike that supposed binary), she experiments with style, but the boundary-pushing never comes at the expense of story nor does it detract at all from our ability to empathize with her characters.
And my, she can keep us on our toes as readers. Catch her narrator being sly, winking at us....
As in this page that I photographed, below,
and commented on in the same Instagram post. Sly, sly, and more sly, and I'm sure you'll find as much pleasure as I did in catching examples of the little echoes she leaves for readers to spot, or not...
More to come soon, I hope. Also need to say a few words about Ferrante's and Knausgaard's. And I just read Atul Gawande's Being Mortal and I think it's ever so important. right now, I'm reading a charming, rather philosophical novel about reading and life and barging down the Seine in search of lost love. Yes, I want skeptical about the too-preciousotential of Nina George's The Little Paris Bookshop, but it won me over by several chapters in. And selfishly, I'm diving back into those pages as soon as. Click Publsh here....But if you leave any comments, you know I'll be back to read them....
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