LIBRARY
Bookshelf
A Cigarette Lit Backwards
For the Term of His Natural Life
The Da Vinci Code
Cloudstreet
High Fidelity
My notes
- Midlife crisis meets coming-of-age story
- Sad, but also very funny and hopeful
- Great writing, very English, highly enjoyable
The Factory
My notes
- Very disorienting - hard to get a sense of time or place
- An arduous read, but ironically that may have been the point (a critique of mindless work and capitalism)
- Has that "Kafkaesque" uneasiness throughout
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
My notes
- Demolished in about two days. Total page-turner
- Kind of fronts as a murder mystery but actually more about Christopher and his autism/Aspergers
- Book came out in 2003, apparently considered controversial now (exaggerated/insensitive?) which is actually a shame because I felt it really made me think about what it must be like to live with it
- All in all, a great and very unique book
The Ministry of Time
My notes
- This is screaming out to be a BBC mini series (in production at the moment I believe)
- Fun and vivid writing
- Rom com, sci fi (time travel), history, spy thriller, dystopia, very human connection
- Genre-bending
- More about the setting, characters and fun than the details per se. Many details left out or left unsaid
Stinkbug
My notes
- Kind of like Silicon Valley meets White Lotus
- Corporate cult thriller
- Unhinged work culture satire
- Explores corporate hypocrisy - "we're a family", wellness and "values"