Read/reading: Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion, Up In The Air by Walter Kirn.

You might have noticed - that was quick. Reading Warm Bodies has taught me that it’s ages since I’ve read a YA novel (the last was probably the Hunger Games trilogy, the freaked out reactions to which Arden can attest were during April 2012), and it’s almost alarming how quickly the words fly off the page when you’re used to more dense, tortured material. But it’s fun!

It’s funny - Stephanie Meyer has a cover quote, but it’s far from her dreck; there’s a metric ton of gallows humour, a believable and active female character, and a protagonist who reinvents rather than wholeheartedly dilutes an already-established idea (zombies to Meyer’s vampires). It feels very filmic already, so I can see where the adaptation came from; that said, I wouldn’t be surprised if they change a couple of things. Like the clear nod to erections in the closing pages. I doubt that made it in.

Continuing with the books-with-film-adaptations theme for a little while. Most of it’s because I’m currently bleeding the college library dry, and they’re mostly academic so have an awful literature collection; but, at the same time, stuff like this tends to be fairly interesting. Usually, even if the film adaptation’s awful, the work that it’s adapted from holds some scrutiny.

Read/reading: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion.

Extremely Loud is an odd book. It’s kind of fragmented, which is how I read it - short bursts over a month, because I’m sometimes terrible at committing to books and this one was definitely challenging at points. But it’s rewarding - the protagonist, nine-year-old Oskar Schell, is a fascinating character and it felt almost painful to be torn away from him by the alternative perspectives presented throughout the novel. It’s not perfect - some of the more experimental sections border on the banal - but it’s fascinating in a way that few books have been lately.

I’m not expecting much from Warm Bodies - I know it’s unabashedly populist, a YA novel, and the film was middling to good(ish). I just need something lighter after that mammoth.

Read/reading: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky.

Okay, so Perks doesn’t quite qualify as “silly”, but it’s a bit lighter reading.

Things Fall Apart wasn’t quite what I was expecting. On the one hand, there’s a clear winner by the end (white people, having fun), but the book focuses more on the journey to that point. It seems more like a clash of cultures than an express judgement on colonialism, and that came as something of a surprise; having heard this exalted as the first true postcolonial text, that it contained some degree of nuance was refreshing to see.

I never really studied postcolonialism over the course of my degree, so I’m necessarily ignorant on the subject, and therefore can’t judge how true-to-life this book is. There are some very ugly (I was going to say primitive, but that would condescend) attitudes towards women on the side of the black protagonist and his village, and an almost casual attitude towards violence - I won’t spoil the explicit details, but a number of deaths occur throughout this novel, and the vast majority are committed by Nigerians against Nigerians.

It suspends judgement, though, and maybe that’s what the postcolonial literary movement needed - not something that took an explicit position, but one that just laid out a surrogate for the colonisation of Nigeria in bare terms. In that respect, it’s impressive. And wonderfully written, but that almost feels like an afterthought.

The idiosyncracies of teenagers are going to seem very superfluous after reading this.

Finished/starting: A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick, Lord of the Flies by William Golding.

I took my time with this novel, and I think that’s why I ended up enjoying it - the central drug in the story takes those little nervous tics, moments of paranoia and confusion and ramps everything up - so everything’s simultaneously relatable and alien at the same time. Easily better than Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and a lot more personally affecting.

I’m scared of the effect that the next book might have on me.