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Good Reading : July 2007
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reading life 2 Meet Peter Watt king of the Australian historical action novel! ... and Owen Sheers, Welsh poet turned novelist ... Plus Medico turned writer Jim Leavesley fixes his gimlet eye on authors and their aches and pains Great Fathers Day gift guide! The enduring popularity of vintage girls’ school and pony books ORDER YOUR COPY NOW! NEXT ISSUE on sale 27 July Here is another extract from NICK HORNBY’s column in American magazine the Believer called ‘Stuff I’ve Been Reading’. This time, Nick has a go atanSFnovel… Suddenly sick of my taste in books, I vowed to read something I wouldn’t nor mally pick up. After much deliberation I decided that in the nor mal course of events I’d never read an SF/Fantasy novel in a million years. Now read on. Even buying Iain M Banks’s Excession was excruciating. Queuing up behind me at the cash desk was a very attractive young woman clutching some kind of groovy art magazine, and I felt obscurely compelled to tell her that the reason I was buying this purple book with a spacecraft on the cover was because of the Believer, and the Believer was every bit as groovy as her art magazine. In a rare moment of maturity, however, I resisted the compulsion. She could, I decided, think whatever the hell she wanted. It wasn’t a relationship that was ever going to go anywhere anyway. I’m with someone, she’s probably with someone, she was 25 years younger than me, and – let’s face it – the Believer isn’t as groovy as all that. If we had got together, that would have been only the first of many disappointing discoveries she’d make. When I actu- ally tried to read Excession, embar rassment was swiftly replaced by trauma. Iain M Banks is a highly rated Scottish novelist who has written twenty-odd novels, half of them (the non-SF half) under the name Iain Banks, and though I’d never previously read him, everyone I know who is familiar with his work loves him. And nothing in the 20-odd pages I managed of Excession was in any way bad; it’s just that I didn’t understand a word. I didn’t even understand the blurb on the back of the book: ‘Two and a half millennia ago, the artefact appeared in a remote cor ner of space, beside a trillion-year-old dying sun from a different universe. It was a perfect black-body sphere, and it did nothing. Then it disappeared. Now it is back.’ This is clearly intended to entice us into the novel – that’s what blurbs do, right? But this blurb just made me scared. An artefact – that’s something you nor mally find in a museum, isn’t it? Well, what’s a museum exhibit doing floating around in space? So what if it did nothing? What are museum exhibits supposed to do? And this dying sun – how come it’s switched universes? Can dying suns do that? The urge to weep tears of frustration was already upon me even before I read the short prologue, which seemed to describe some kind of andro- gynous avatar visiting a woman who has been pregnant for forty years and who lives on her own in the tower of a giant spaceship. (Is this the arte - fact? Or the dying sun? Can a dying sun be a spaceship? Probably.) By the time I got to the first chapter, which is entitled ‘Outside Context Problem’ and begins ‘(CGU Grey Area signal sequence file #n428857/119)’, I was crying so hard that I could no longer see the page in front of my face, at which point I abandoned the entire ill-conceived experiment altogether. I haven’t felt so stupid since I stopped attending physics lessons aged 14. Nick Hornby’s collected essays from the Believer, September 2003– June 2006, were published as The Complete Polysyllabic Spree: The Diary of an Occasionally Exasperated But Ever Hopeful Reader in October 2006 by Penguin/Viking, rrp $35.00
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