first day of the week, already in shambles

It’s been one of those mornings…

I managed to have my email client crash on me twice this morning, and one of those times I was actually in the middle of composing a blog entry. It’s forever lost, as I was hurriedly doing several things at once, and I can only remember part of what I had said. (I hate loosing things I’ve written. I’m rather obsessive about it.)

The day started out so beautiful. I walked out of my door this morning, saw this weird flatbed truck in the middle of the street carrying strange looking machinery, and walked right back inside looking for my digital camera.

The part of the entry I can remember was my disappointed review of Jeff Noon’s Falling out of Cars, which I finished this weekend. Basically, it kept up this awesomely poetic tone, (which I would be hard pressed to keep up for more than a few pages, I’m sure), but failed to tell a decent story. I guess Noon is working on reinventing narrative, or some other equally extraordinary description, but in this particular instance, I think it failed to communicate. I would have liked a better picture of the milieu, or more plot, either one would have done me fine, but when there’s essentially no plot to speak of, and the main character’s observations about reality are all pretty much subject to question… we have a broken mirror’s reflection of a novel indeed. (Broken mirrors featured prominently in the story. The main character was searching for what was probably Alice’s.)

I am now reading Michael Marshal Smith’s Only Forward. Every time I go to amazon.co.uk it suggests this guy, and I’d never heard of him, so I finally broke down and bought this one (when I bought Falling out of Cars). So far I’m glad I did. It’s is a fun future detective novel, and so far a bit reminiscent of Stevenson’s Snow Crash, albeit not quite the same level of action-packed intensity.

You can check out my mindblurbs for the brainstormed list of titles for this entry.