Books What I Done Been Reading

On the bus this morning I finally finished reading Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress Of Solitude, which I’d been given as a birthday gift back in March.

The book is essentially about New York, and Brooklyn in particular. It takes a panorama of themes equal to The Wire in scope. Race relations, gentrification, the end of hippy ideologies, music, drugs, graffiti, and some other bits and bobs are all touched upon as we follow the lives of 2 character growing up from the 70s to the present-ish day. There’s also a vein of the fantastic running through the book’s core, which intertwines with the characters’ love of comic books.

The whole thing’s pretty ambitious basically, and the writing style is a bit dense at first – it took a while for it to grip me, but I’m really glad I stuck with it.

The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway

I just finished reading The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway (who, it turns out, is John le Carre's son). I really enjoyed it. It's very geeky. Pirates, ninjas, kung fu, mime artists, truckers, soldiers, and corporate lackeys all thrown together in a post-apocalyptic satire of the Iraq war. Of sorts. The writing is very kinetic. Words spin and ricochet off the page, turn down dead-ends and head off on tangents. Quite breath-taking really.