Why do we read books? Ok, or ebooks, for those literalists who can’t possibly be so unprecise as to equate the two. We read, same as watching a movie, to ‘take us away’. From reality. From ‘life’. From all the shit rushing round our minds. We detach. We take a time out and visit Slow Horses land. Or we take a trip to Wuthering Heights (if we really fucking have to). Or we temporarily place ourselves at the mercy of Stephen King’s imaginary dark world. And with reading, probably more than movies, definitely more than watching stuff on tv, you are completely absorbed. There’s no ‘room’ for stray thoughts of the outside world disturbing the… story. So because ‘the outside world’ is getting a bit obsessive at the moment, I FUCKING NEED AN ESCAPE!

I just finished ‘The last chair lift’ by John Irving. He’s my favourite author in the world. Along with Stephen King and Mick Herron, obviously. But unlike those two, his offerings to the literary world are way less frequent. Way, way less. You get about one every five years. But Oh. My. God. Are they worth waiting for. His books never relate in any way to each other, but they do have constant themes. Mainly, people who are a bit ‘odd’. Not in any grotesque way, just ‘a bit not normal’. He likes to write about small people. (He is not a big man). His characters often wrestle at school/college. (He wrestled at school/college). There’s lots of seduction of underage people by adults. Normally of boys but not in his latest. (I make no judgments). And as his books have progressed through the years, a degree of… non-hetero-ism has entered his fiction. (I can only wonder). Taken all the way to non-binaries in his latest. But the characters are rich. You ‘know’ them. And they’re wonderful. I read ‘the world according to Garp’ in about 1982. That was my first Irving. Its brilliant. Unusual. Then Hotel New Hampshire. Cider House Rules (like ‘Garp’, made into a fantastic movie). A Prayer for Owen Meany (one of his weirdest and best characters). And then everything else. Up to ‘chair lift’, in which all the weirdness of all his previous characters and storylines are distilled into a never-ending spiral of perfectly logical strangeness in the world he creates. I loved it. But I’m an ‘Irving-y’. Like a Swift-y, but for the literary classes. (In my other ‘class’, I’m a Swifty too, by the way, and love her dearly).

And now I’m reading a fab book by John Sandford. Who? Exactly. I’d never heard of him until a few weeks ago in the Sunday Times, they asked authors who they read. And Mick Herron (all kneel) said he loved John Sandford. I immediately bought 3. And they’re good. Great, in fact.

So go read a book. Because after a truly diabolical week, it’s the only way to escape the grim realities we need to consider.

Happy Saturday

A xxxx