The Book Tower

…or perhaps back to business as usual as these pages have been rather quiet of late.

I’m blaming it on large books. Bricks. Doorstoppers. Whatever you want to call them. I completed The Life and Death of Peter Sellers by Roger Lewis, an obsessional biography at over 1000 pages. Then came Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. This is a book I was determined to finish after several false starts in the past. I loved it up until a point – the point being around page 300 when all hope of comprehending the novel began to seep away. Sadly I was just pleased to complete it and toss it aside; Pynchon became an irritation rather than a joy. I was ultimately depressed with the sheer weight of it. I feel like a mountain climber who just collapses after reaching the summit in need of a lot of rest. There’s no real sense of exhilaration.

Is that the end of mammoth books for now? I doubt it, I still have The Tin Drum to read…