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rawmeat
General musings on my reading recently.
The books I quite liked were ‘Exit West’ by Moshin Hamid. I guess it wasn’t a flawless execution as such, but I found it really refreshing to read something that I found entirely new and unexpected.
There's a bit of magical realism, but the story doesn’t go into too much detail about it. He just pulls in some supernatural elements when he needs to speed up the story a bit. Works really well IMO.
‘Smile’ by Roddy Doyle had a fairly predictable narrative arc perpahs, but the story flows very well. Recommended.
I had a go at a few novels by Toni Morrison seeing as she won the Nobel prize. In a way she’s a great writer. At least to me, she is great at dialogue and building up quirky characters. But once I had read a couple I felt that she mostly develops her stories through dialogue. A bit like American movies where they bang a few very different characters together and just let endless scenes of bickering and arguments drive the story forward. Of the ones I read, I liked 'Sula' the most.
Not sure if I mentioned it before in this thread, but ‘My Dark Vanessa’ by Kate Elizabeth Russell was one of the best books I read in 2020.
Stefan Zweig’s ‘Beware of Pity’ was well written (I read the English translation) but not really worth the effort IMO.