A Man in Love (My struggle book 2), Karl Ove Knausgaard, many days in, The Player of Games, Iain. M. Banks

Ill today, and somehow Karl Ove Knausgaard was too much to read while feeling slightly nauseous and uncomfortable.  I picked up The Player of Games to read again, but the print was small and unclear - that slightly smudged effect that you get in cheap paperbacks and the paper  yellowed with age so it wasn't a comfortable reading experience.
I had a look how much it cost on the Kindle, and it was only £3.99, so I downloaded it for  big font size easy read.

I had forgotten the basic premise of The Player of Games, even though it's one of my favourite books.  The eponymous player of games is tricked into playing a game in a far off civilisation, blackmailed in fact. He has committed a small indiscretion, but one that , even in the anything goes tolerant world of the Culture (even because it is an anything goes tolerant world), will haunt him if disclosed. It's both the relative littleness of the thing, but the fact that it impinges on his honesty so directly, that almost hollows out his life, makes it worthless, when he been having existential doubts about its worth anyway. This unease is at the heart of the book, and although it is soon eclipsed by the events that follow, this time round I reflected on the the way in which he would never forget the dishonour that he had committed on himself, even as the thing itself diminished through time and perspective. It was like a low level ontological nausea that mirrored the slightly physically sick feeling I had myself.

The Hare with the Amber Eyes - Day 1

It's always difficult to find something to read after finishing something fairly classic - I realise that I had that feeling after reading Marquez even though i didn't care for it that much, it was great writing. So to go on to Nabakov was a an OK step, there wasn't any change down in gear. The Hare with the Amber Eyes, no disrespect to it, is a bit of a come down. It's well written, by someone who is used to paying a lot of attention to sight, line and detail (the author is a potter or ceramicist or something like that, it's meticulously researched, it's an easy read. It has a bit of an anodyne, rarefied and distinctly unconfessional autobiographical strand, as well as the family history.  I started reading it a while ago and put it down for something more exciting. I haven't yet skim read the bits that I have read, just plunged in again, and there is "enough there to keep me reading" . That's in quotes because I think I say it a lot, and have probably already written that exact phrase in an earlier blog.

The only thing is, is it worth the effort to blog about? Given that I'm blogging/writing about the process of reading, then it is. It will mean that I'll have to write about a real range of books, including some of the less than intellectual/ great lit. books that I love to slum it with. That does need an example. Well I guess Peter Hamilton would be one.(he's a science fiction / space opera writer of huge sprawling books, full of ideas and imaginative scope, but also full of characters with about as much depth as the the doppelgänger Rimmer in that episode of Red Dwarf where Rimmers "best self" appears - "smoke me a kipper for breakfast" and all that. What a shame though that I read the Hydrogen Sonata before I wrote this, because I rate Iain. M. Banks hugely.  Yes I would rate Excession above Lolita, above Love in the Time of Cholera, just because it has more scope, it isn't so knotted up in its own intellectual ribbons, and corseted by definitions of literature. Whatever that may mean.