What I Read

Introduction

This is my dip into the new Vocal Book Club Community which you can find out more about here.

I've included The Charlatans' "Tellin' Stories" because these books tell us stories.

Twenty years ago I started a blog, Seven Days In, that has gone through many phases and is now a diary of the books that I am reading, and you can check it out here and join the five thousand robots a day who also seem to find it interesting. Note you need to digest it quickly as the is a meta redirect that sends it to one of my Vocal pages after about ninety seconds, though on older pages it is sixty seconds.

So this week I finished "The Great Gatsby" by F Scott Fitzgerald and was not too enamored with it although there were many memorable and quotable lines in it. Check here for a list

“And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”

It did remind me of "Catcher In The Rye" by JD Salinger, just in the feel and the language and characters.

Although the book left me cold I was impressed by the film "The Great Gatsby", the mansions and party scenes were absolutely stunning and i was mightily impressed with Gatsby's car, a Duesenberg like the 1929 Model J.

Feel free to check my blog to see what I have been reading.

My current book is "The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy (A Trilogy In Five Parts)" by the sadly missed Douglas Adams, and I am thoroughly re-enjoying it, an antidote to "The Great Gatsby".

Favorites

My favorite author is JG Ballard, often his prose is almost like poetry, but he was a master of making ordinary life threatening and frightening.

Two examples of this are Concrete Island about a man who crashes and some wasteland on an intersection and he can't escape, and High Rise about communities regressing and turning in on themselves with disastrous outcomes.

He is a definite influence on my dystopian pieces, along with Kafka and to some extent Orwell. This story was influenced by Ballard.

Although Ballard is my favourite author, my favourite book is "Imajica" by Clive Barker. What I love about it is the circular nature of the story. It is about 1200 pages so I bought a copy on Kindle and when I finish it I just start it again.

I wrote a Vocal piece on it here

Conclusion

I hope I have given you a little food for thought and a few books to possibly read.

Thank you so much for reading.