what are you reading now?

[jenks]

The dialogue is so good. It sounds even better when she reads it. She talks about how she loves talking to taxi drivers who tell her all kinds of stuff.

with regard to Barrett, if Young Skins is a kind of modern Dubliners then Homesickness is definitely him trying to not be defined by home. I did wish The Alps had done more with the set up and the dog sitting one annoyed me but lots of the rest were far better than the LRB review gives credit.

 

[jenks]

Just reading Bad Eminence by James Greer which has lots going on by is spoilt by being too knowing, too in love with its own cleverness.
Also read a bunch of the stories in Polluted Sex by Lauren Foley - raw and direct, verging on the pornographic, short stories of a very different Irish writer from either Barrett or Erskine.
Really like Sonia Overall’s Eden but I think it’s not half as good if you don’t know Hemingway’s Garden of Eden.
Rereading Charles Baxter’s Burning Down the House - essays on fiction and writing. So good.