I managed to finish Ruth Rendell's The Speaker of Mandarin and that's it. Ordinarily I'd just go read more Rendell, but that's summer lassitude talking. None of my genre books inspires me with the desire to read; I reaĺly need cooler weather for those doorstoppers. So I had the bright idea of trying something Completely Different. I have a number of my mother's books, ganked from the home library thirty years ago: mostly stuff I thought I might want to read sometime in my old age etc. Well, old age is on me, so let's try something mainstream. In this case, Elizabeth Bowen's The Hotel. And it starts very nicely with a bunch of tween war expats summering in, I assume, the south of France. It could be the lead-in to an Agatha Christie mystery. But then it goes on and on, and no one is murdered, and I can't keep the various Mrses and Misses straight, and it becomes as much a chore as the genre works.
So I fall back on a Front Lawn Library Ian Rankin, which is probably not going to cheer me up, given past Rankins, but oh well. Yes, I know I should just forge on with Hamabe no Kafka, because when everything reads the same, Murakami's utterly mundane Japanese at least has the virtue of language practice. But I only have patience for a few pages at a time of that.
Roll on September...
