Cecily's book reviews

In general I've written reviews of every book I've read since I joined GoodReads (RIP) in May 08, along with one or two I read prior to that. More recent reviews tend to be longer (sometimes a tad too long?). I always carry a book, though I don't get as much time as I'd like to get engrossed - life is busy, but in a good way. Too many of my favourite authors died without writing enough! Apart from reading, and writing about reading, I enjoy Scrabble, good restaurants, woodland, and attending the theatre.
The Rules of Attraction - Bret Easton Ellis Manic and not very likeable. It follows the (love - though that is hardly the word) lives of a group of students at a New England university in 1985s. It opens mid sentence and unfolds in frantic chunks, focusing on different characters. It's certainly frank about sex and drugs etc, but it's not as funny as it seems to think; my overriding impression is that of a precocious child trying to shock - so what? Still, an interesting contrast to the exaggerated naïveté of Starter for Ten A Novel.

In Ellis' defence, he does warn you. It opens with a Tim O'Brien quote which sums it up very well: "The facts, even when beaded on a chain, still did not have real order. Events did not flow. The facts were separate and haphazard and random even as they happened, episodic, broken, no smooth transitions, no sense of unfolding from prior events."

Currently reading

The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy
Sebastian Peake, China Miéville, Mervyn Peake
Gormenghast
Mervyn Peake