The Very Last of Summer

Well, the summer's technically over, the kids are back at school and Monday will see me nose down in my doctoral stuff again. I've had a tremendous time reading purely for pleasure over the 'holidays' and can't say that I'm really relishing a return to the dry prose of academia.
I followed The Elegance of the Hedgehog with Zafon's The Angel's Game, which I thought was a lot better than his Shadow of the Wind. It was a gripping page-turner, somewhat overblown in style (although I'd got into his idiom by then), with aspirations to be far more grand guignol than it actually is. A good summer read.

I then polished off The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, and although I thought it was an excellent conceit (narrated by the omniscient and surprisingly compassionate figure of death), I didn't think it was quite as good as I'd been led to believe. The characters were a little too wooden and uninvolving to provoke empathy ,and some (like the foster-mother and Max), didn't quite work for me. I had the sneaking suspicion that the author thought that the situation would be sufficient to arouse compassion and emotion, but the overall effect was strangely distancing. I also couldn't quite decide who it was aimed at (not that that is important in the long run): the older child-reader or adults? The format (bite size chapters, explanations and large-ish font-size) heavily suggested the former, but the scope and ambition seemed to flag up an older audience. Enjoyable enough, but not really thought-provoking or engaging.

My last book of the summer has turned out to be Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna, which will last me a while, I think. As soon as I opened it up, I realised that the writing in this novel is streets ahead of anything else that I have read recently. It's superbly well-written, which came as a refreshing change (probably because she writes in English and hasn't had to undergo some half-arsed translation process). The story is a slow burner, and none the worse for that - one of the gripes I had with Zafon was, in fact, the ridiculously fast pace at which characters fell in love for life, or situations evolved and were resolved. I am enjoying The Lacuna immensely at the moment, and intend to seek out her earlier work The Poisonwood Bible as and when I finish this one off, which - given my imminent return to study - may be some time!