Graham Swift – BooksPlease

I finished reading The Light of Day byGraham Swift yesterday. Table Talk asked in the comments on my Sunday Salon post whether to try books by Swift. Well, maybe. This one turned out to be a bit drawn out towards the end, but I felt compelled to finish it. I’m still not sure I like his style of writing, nor the enigmatic way of introducing characters. As Jane said in the comments on Sunday it’s hard to start a book sometimes because of the learning curve and it was.

Here is the teaser:

Back to being you.

There are times, there always will be, when you still wish you weren’t, you’d never been you. Or when you could almost believe it really was some other person, not you – how could it have been you? – who did what you’re supposed to have done. (page 197)

For more teasers, visit Should Be Reading.

We’re not moving into our new house for a while yet and I’m writing this in a rented barn conversion, which is just beautiful. I’ll take a few photos later. For now, I’m just writing a short post about what I’m reading today, which is not what is shown on the sidebar under “Currently Reading”.

I brought some books with me but as there are some here I had a look at them and started to read The Light of Day by Graham Swift.

I shouldn’t like this book – it’s written in the first person present tense, a style I don’t like much, it begins very enigmatically referring to characters and events when I have no idea who or what they are and there are quite a lot of short sentences without verbs – my English teacher wouldn’t have let me get away with that. And yet it works, it builds up suspense and tension. The cover is different from the one I’ve shown here, but I can’t find the same one on line, so this will have to do.