The Mantel was such tripe that I abandoned it. Shame on me. I will now never know the details of the French Revolution. Ah well.
I'm now reading The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. It's dramatically verbose, but perhaps that's a result of the translation rather than the text itself. I've also been dipping into True Tales of American Life, edited by Paul Auster. Gorgeous vignettes submitted to Auster who then read out the choice pieces on NPR. And Best American Essays 2003, collected from periodicals over the year. Not strictly beach material, but good for tube journeys. American periodicals do such a good job of encouraging almost literary non-fiction prose. They give real space to these sorts of pieces in magazines that are harder to locate in the UK (if that's not too contradictory). Tho' Zembla's doing quite a good job.
I'm now reading The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. It's dramatically verbose, but perhaps that's a result of the translation rather than the text itself. I've also been dipping into True Tales of American Life, edited by Paul Auster. Gorgeous vignettes submitted to Auster who then read out the choice pieces on NPR. And Best American Essays 2003, collected from periodicals over the year. Not strictly beach material, but good for tube journeys. American periodicals do such a good job of encouraging almost literary non-fiction prose. They give real space to these sorts of pieces in magazines that are harder to locate in the UK (if that's not too contradictory). Tho' Zembla's doing quite a good job.
