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Getting into character

Sigh. I was arguing about OuLiPo over on I Love Books and it reminded me of the time I used to regularly read vaguely highbrow stuff...

Okay, that's slightly misleading. I've got Harry Mathews, Slavoj Zizek and the new Pynchon on my reading pile at the moment. I still find time to read, just as I still somehow fnd time to write. Just not enough. But when I'm lying in bed at the end of a bone-shattering night then my brain is a little too fried to cope with it.

Your friend, at this juncture, is genre fiction. Specifically (for me) crime fiction. Fantasy and sci-fi have their adherents (and I'm partial to a spot of Iain Banks from time to time) but really, when I just want to relax and I'm not up to anything overly taxing, you can't beat a brutal murder or nine. Which is why I, seventeen years late, am catching up on Ian Rankin's Rebus novels. And they're great, the prose can be a little clunky, and the use of ellipses somewhat baffling, but the character himself is so compelling that it takes me back to being a kid reading Dragonlance novels and rooting for the good guys; cleverly, Rebus is self-destructive and bloody-minded enough to engage the cynical adult alongside the enthusiastic kid (mind you, so was Raistlin).

The great thing about coming so late to the party is that I'm reading and enjoying them in the knowledge that there's a vast tranche of work out there that I've not seen yet. It's like knowng that there's a great big bar of Green and Black's in the cupboard. And with that sentence I acknowledge that this is the single most middle class post I've ever written, but such is life.

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