Another break, another catch-up.
Day 12 – the most emotionally draining book I’ve ever read, and one which forced me to stop, put it down and wait a bit, is American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis. There are so many stomach turning scenes of creative, highly stylised violence in this book, and at some points, I felt too strung out by what Bateman was doing to his assortment of victims (real or not) I had to stop. Whilst this means I’m probably too wimpy to read hard-edged, cutting social satire, the disciples would say, I simply feel that it was excessive in the extreme.
I know that the point of the book, and the very excessiveness of it, is to hold up a mirror to the shallow and egocentric lifestyles of the rich and vacuous, and to make them squirm in their expensively tailored suits, but part of me feels that it would be more effective if the violence was toned down a notch – people wouldn’t read it to say they’ve read it. All in all, a disgusting, draining, nausea inducing book.
Day 13 – my favourite childhood book
I covered, in my last post, Roald Dahl (in relative depth), as his books got me into reading, and were the first books I read. However, my childhood reading, as opposed to my junior school/grammar school reading, is typified by one book: JRR Tolkein’s The Hobbit.
The number of times I borrowed this from our local library is lost in the mists of time (and their computer system), but I must have read it over 30 times. I devoured the story of Bilbo’s hunt for treasure, his battling with Smaug, his riddles with Gollum, the dwarves, the elves and the wizards. It could be that Tolkein, like Dahl, wasn’t writing down at children – he didn’t write as complicated a story or use as complex language as he did with the Lord of the Rings, but he didn’t do what some authors (and adults) do with children, and patronise.
It’s a dark old story, and told well, in the classic fable style he took into The Fellowship of the Ring, but which turned into a horribly overwrought chronicle in the final two parts of the Ring saga. It was my first brush with fantasy, and the laguage, the epic sweep, the outlandish but still somehow human characters all struck a chord with me, which continues to this day. I haven’t read the book in a good few years, but will definitely do so before the grand Peter Jackson epic is unleashed on the world, for good or ill.
