Joshua Cohen: Andrew O'Hagan.

     Yes, there has been a long gap since I last blogged anything. 

June 9 was the last entry and now it is August 28. It just seems that we have been very busy for a long time. First was a trip to Guernsey, where we hiked the whole of the south coast on  spectacular cliff paths and also visited the island of Sark. If you go to Guernsey, you will find the south coast rugged and scenic, with high cliffs; but the north coast is rather flat and uninteresting. You can take a regular bus all the way round the island, and it is something of a miracle the way the buses thread their way through the very narrow roads. 

     In mid-July we picked up a rental car and drove more than 1700 miles--Cotswolds, West Wales, Plymouth, the south coast of Cornwall close to Lands End, the north coast of Cornwall at Bude, and finally Clovelly on the north Devon coast, before we returned to my sister in Plymouth and--after a couple of days--we drove back to Heathrow, with a night in Marlborough on the way. We landed at Dulles on August 11, and we have been very busy since then, with a round of overdue check-ups of teeth and body parts--all of which seem to be working well.

     But over this period I have not stopped reading. I should mention, though, a couple of books I started to read and then gave up--probably quite unjustly. There is a new book by Joshua Cohen called "Book of Numbers" that was fairly well reviewed in The Economist: "Weighing in at nearly 600 pages, "Book of Numbers" is an unabashedly ambitious novel..it features not one but two characters with the same name as the author, Joshua Cohen, which has been a favorite device of writers keen to seem playful by toying with meta-narrative profundities. Sprawling and messy, spanning continents and styles, the book is already being heralded as a "Ulysses" for the digital age." I checked with my local library to see if it was available for download--but I could only find another book by Cohen called "Leverage," which I downloaded. It turned out to be a story about high school kids and feuds between the various coaches--football, track and gymnastics--and it was first-person narrated by three schoolboys. I began to feel that it may have been aimed at adolescent readers, and I gave up--even though I did admire the writing.

     It is with some shame that I admit the next novel I abandoned was Andrew O'Hagan's "The Illuminations"--ecstatically reviewed, I later discovered, and a Booker prize contender--I forget whether it was long or short-listed. The first chapter had an elderly lady in an assisted-living facility and the second chapter British troops in Afghanistan, and I concluded that neither interested me...I quit; but  having subsequently read excellent reviews, I realize I should have hung in there. And I will try again.