I heard about this book on NPR and simply had to have it - after weeks of talking about it, my best friend finally got it for me as an early birthday gift. I was so excited to read it, I prepared myself to do nothing else for an entire weekend.
But once I started it, I just felt like I was slogging through. The premise was so intriguing to me - Dave, an average London cabbie, is frustrated by just about everything in life and he keeps a diary of sorts. He buries it away and it is found 500 years later in a post-apocalypse England. The problems I had getting into it were due to the phonetically tuned writing, mostly, and the problem of keeping characters straight in my head. My attention would often wander, which is always a sign that I'm just not that into a book.
I'm sure if I could have managed to really delve into this book, I would have loved it. I have read and heard wonderful things about it - but it just wasn't for me. Someone with more time and perhaps more determination would probably really enjoy it.
But once I started it, I just felt like I was slogging through. The premise was so intriguing to me - Dave, an average London cabbie, is frustrated by just about everything in life and he keeps a diary of sorts. He buries it away and it is found 500 years later in a post-apocalypse England. The problems I had getting into it were due to the phonetically tuned writing, mostly, and the problem of keeping characters straight in my head. My attention would often wander, which is always a sign that I'm just not that into a book.
I'm sure if I could have managed to really delve into this book, I would have loved it. I have read and heard wonderful things about it - but it just wasn't for me. Someone with more time and perhaps more determination would probably really enjoy it.
It is a little hard to read, since the author invents a new dialect related to cockney, it has a glossary in the back. It's a like another post-apocalyptic book, Station 11. (Yeah, yeah, I know there's about a million differences)
This was a complex and gripping book about family, madness, love and religion, with a new vocabulary to get used to from the beginning. At first, I wasn't sure I liked the book, but the story soon caught my interest and I wanted to learn more about Dave and the future inhabitants of Ham.
Well, the plot is interesting, but it's really hard to read, since he makes up (I presume) a cockney-esque language 2000 years in the future, so it is difficult to understand what the characters are saying. Even the flashbacks to the 21st century are hard to follow.
