Reading for Fun

Pavlov's Cat has re-started her semi-dormant blog about books and writing called A Fugitive Phenomenon. The first new entry is about her job reading four novels a week for the "In Short" reviews in the Spectrum section of the Sydney Morning Herald (and probably The Age as well- I wouldn't know). This seems like a serious waste of her time and talent. I mean, I read those reviews every week. They're really short - she says abotu 180 words. They contain just enough information for me to go "yes" or "no" or "maybe Mum would like that for Christmas" but aren't "proper" book reviews as such. Some weeks, if it's quite clear from the title or author that I'm not likely to be interested, I don't even read anything except the first sentence. But, with the other (longer) book reviews, I feel obliged to read every word. I guess that I assume that because someone's put the effort in to write so much I might learn something even if it's a book I wouldn't read unless it and I were all alone together on a desert island.

And I hadn't actually noticed that someone had to read FOUR books every week to write about a THIRD of a page of one part of the paper. Talk about labour intensive!

Although part of me would love to hang around at home reading all day, another part would really prefer to be writing 1,000 words about one book a week - ideally one that I wanted to read in the first place. Maybe Pav could try that approach - with each column continuing the review of the first book and the final sentence of the fourth column saying "oh and don't bother about the other three books pictured. I hated them." Kind of like I do here...

Anyway, too clever by at least a quarter Gilbert Adair has written a spoof whodunnit called The Act of Roger Murgatroyd. He plays with the genre of the polite murder in an English country house in the 1930s where all the genteel guests are suspects and cannot escape until a blizzard abates. There's even a lady novelist specialising in detective stories on the scene who talks at length about her own work and how she wouldn't try anything as cliched as a "locked room mystery".

Everyone has a motive for killing a thoroughly unpleasant young man but as clues gather, it becomes harder and harder to tell red herrings from kippers. There's a map at the front that I spent several minutes puzzling over when the book describes the house's layout but it made no sense. One of the characters talks about how dumb it is for readers to rely on diagrams for clues so I felt suitably chastened (this feeling was only alleviated by smugness when I guessed the murderer well before the ending).

In short, the book was a delight. The period details seemed spot on and it had a reallt satisfying conclusion.