‘Before I Go To Sleep’ by S. J. Watson has been one of this year’s most talked about thrillers. The plot centres around Christine who wakes up every day not knowing where she is, who her husband is or what has happened in the last twenty odd years of her life. With her memories of the day being erased every single night, who can she trust?
The concept of memory loss is an interesting one and if it is done convincingly, like in the film ‘Memento’, it can be highly intriguing and enthralling. The first part of the novel seemed very promising. However, as I was reading the book, I found myself wanting to pick holes in the situation that Watson presents to us. For a start, Christine’s journal entries are too detailed to be plausible and are still written in the style of a novel (who has time to write 20+ pages in a day with complete dialogue?). The fact that nobody checked up on Christine after she was discharged from hospital is also barely believable (but then S. J. Watson did work for the NHS so maybe the catalogue of failings in Christine’s care is based on truth…). Continue reading
Having got my craving for chick lit out of my system for another year, I have been reading ‘A Kestrel for a Knave’ by Barry Hines, one of the grittiest books I’ve read in a while. Set in South Yorkshire in 1968 over the course of a single day, fifteen year old Billy Casper finds Kes, a kestrel hawk, who he learns to take care of and confide in. It’s an accurate and poignant portrait of life in northern England at that time (so my mother tells me) and although the book has a very specific setting, it has timeless qualities and themes that would still resonate with disaffected youth today. 
Last summer, I set myself the slightly insane task of reading two novels a week purely for pleasure, in other words, not related to my degree course. Originally, this ‘project’ was only meant to last for my sixteen week summer break and had been something I had been looking forward to for a long time as I had had only limited access to English language books when I was studying in Paris for a year (the time when I really should have started writing a blog). I expected that I wouldn’t be able to continue the pace during term time. However, nearly ten months later, possibly at the expense of getting a decent result in my degree, I am still managing to read two novels a week, having possibly borrowed more fiction from the university than the non-fiction I am supposed to be reading for my course. Some people ruin their degrees by drinking too many Jagerbombs at toga parties. I, however, may ruin my degree by spending too much of my time reading 653 page novels by Jonathan Franzen instead of journal articles about political analysis. And if my blogging word count starts getting higher than my project word count…well, that’s when I’ll know I have a bit of a problem. 
A Little Blog of Books 
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