Random Thoughts

The worst mistake an author can do when writing short stories in between a series of novels is to try to “fill in” stuff from the backstory. That is, when creating a universe, good authors know a lot about their world that they never actually write (extensively) about. So for instance, if one of the characters have a classic car, the author may know that the original owner was, say, a pop star in the 60s, but would never mention it in the novel. It’s just background information.

When fishing about for material to use for short stories, the temptation is then to write a short story about that car and that pop star, and that’s always really, really tedious to read.

Fortunately, Aaronovitch avoids making that error. Mostly. Instead, most of these stories are just really entertaining almost stand alone pieces, and you can enjoy them without having read the novels, really. (Although some would be more puzzling than others.)

So… this is good fun, if a bit slight.

Tales from the Folly (2020) by Ben Aaronovitch (buy new, buy used, 4.03 on Goodreads)

I bought this (at a sale) back in 2009 along with either Malone Dies or Molloy. I read the other book at the time, but not this one.

I’m really culturemaxxing here — this edition was translated by Norway’s foremost poet, Jan Erik Vold, in the late 60s. And it flows really well; I wasn’t tempted for a second to seek out the English version of this. (Which was translated by Beckett himself from the original French.)

About 20 pages in, we drop paragraph markers, and the pages become Wall Of Text. But this isn’t hard hard to read — we’re not talking Lucy Church Amiably by Gertrude Stein here. There’s even a sort of narrative going on for the first half of the book.

My strategy for reading “difficult” books is to say to myself that I’m reading 20 pages in one sitting, no matter what. No breaks; no diversions; no “just look something up”, because I know that it can be hard to get back to a book like this if I’ve found something else to amuse me. (While I’m reading most novels, I don’t care — I read in a scatter-brained way when I’m reading prose, but when I’m reading comics or Difficult Books, I’m laser focused. For a period of time.)

So it took me more than a week to read this, 20 pages per day, more or less.

Towards the end, it becomes more dense — we get sentences going on for pages at a time.

It’s a pretty spiffy book. I’m guessing many people quote the final bit of the book — “if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” — because they didn’t read the rest, but they should. It’s all good.

L’Innommable (1953) by Samuel Beckett (buy used, 4.0 on Goodreads)

I had a hangover over today from all that jazz yesterday, so I read another mystery.

This is pretty solid — lots of interesting characters and a brisk pace. The only problem was that I took a five minute time out to think about who the murderer could be, and there was really only one possible person. And being right about a mystery is always disappointing.

School for Murder (1983) by Robert Barnard (buy used, 3.56 on Goodreads)