Thursday, March 01, 2007

Why have I never

read anything by John Burnside? His new book The Devil's Footprints (reviewed at the TLS by Karl Miller) sounds excellent, and so do all the others....

No time for light reading round this end, which is a pity (though last night I did finish reading a book I have been consuming in tiny doses around the edges of work in general, Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman's The Fall of the Kings. Which I liked, but at this point in the school year the last thing I want to read is a book about a university, even if it's a fantastical alternate-universe university! I will add, as I am sure I have observed here before, that Terry Pratchett and Diana Wynne Jones are the two supreme novelists of the university in my opinion, they both must have spent a long time observing institutions of higher learning from the peripheries & working out how to skewer them--perhaps I missed the satirical element from this book, there's a bit of it but it's not devastatingly funny, its strengths lie in other directions).

1 comment:

  1. Yes, he's an extremely good novelist, and an excellent poet too...

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