Thursday, 9 February 2023

Ohio - Stephen Markley

Ohio: Amazon.co.uk: Markley, Stephen: 9781501174476: Books 

Gotta love a big chunky novel about suburban America. Actually you don't have to, but I do. Actually, so few people do that the only way for me to get an electronic copy of this book was by borrowing it from my Italian e-library (arguably better stocked than the London ones) and read it in translation. 

Ohio was a great read, suggested by my mum, to whom it was suggested by one of my closest friends (why didn't he suggest it to me in the first place, who knows!). It's well-written, depressing but witty, and ultimately a very interesting portrait of the American mid-West in a community taken over by narcotics and general socio-economic malaise. 

It's also a bit too much. Every page is extremely intense. The parallel plots are one too many, as is the number of chapters. And literally there doesn't appear to be many major characters that are both alive and mentally stable human beings by the end of the book. For the sake of the people of Ohio, I hope their lives are generally a bit simpler than this.

Nothing Like the Sun - Anthony Burgess

 Nothing Like the Sun: The modern classic reimagining Shakespeare's life:  Amazon.co.uk: Anthony Burgess: 9780749079697: Books 

I wouldn't have read this book had it not been for the fact that I'm now running out of titles from the Southwark electronic library that I'd consider reading...

Maybe I'm dumb, or maybe my English is not good enough yet, but man I struggled with this book. Granted, it is, unsurprisingly, like watching a Shakespeare play for me: I understand nothing for the first 15 minutes, then slowly things start to fall in place. The problem here is that reading for me is very much a start-stop thing, in particular these days, so I never really got in the flow of the supposed-16th century prose. 

On the plus side, I checked the Wikipedia entry for the book after I finished. Apparently I got all the main points, but that's hardly a sign of success, and that's not really the reason why one reads a book in the first place.