Alex Brightsmith > Recent Status Updates

Also from the introduction:

"He had an instinct for the kind of people who gave readers the creeps. The Devil. Actors. Husbands ..."

"People ask me a lot why I write thrillers. I think they mean, 'How did such a nice-seeming lady decide to write a book in which someone's small intestine is extracted with a crochet hook?' I make up different answers. But here's the truth: it's fun!"

I generally don't read introductions, more or less on principle, but I'm glad I slipped up and read this one.

"They were capable of anything. And that is key, because no matter how outlandish the plot, if Nazis are behind it, it's believable. Once the world finds out that you sewed twins together, without anaesthesia, there is no 'too crazy' anymore."

Yes, I am reading these simultaneously. I am restless and confused - that's winter for you!

So far this is a long way short of being my favourite Saint book - but since I've read at least eight in the last three months that's not quite so bad as it sounds.

There, that feels better - the house has its own account, purely for cataloging purposes, and I no longer have 700 books on here that I have no intention of reading. It's not the trash I minded so much - you can think what you like of us for having that on the shelves - it was the fear that people would expect me to have read all the Trollope and Dickens and historical biographies and might ask questions.

Much as I hate to admit defeat, I really can't bear to spend another page in the company of Lily Bloom

Hmm. Apparently I've been reading the same two books since January. I should probably fix that.

Ouch. Much as I usually hate spoilers, I may need to know whether Genia survived before I can carry on reading this. In fact, I may need to know *that* Genia survived to be able to carry on. An extraordinarily effective account.

Well that was bleak reading for a bank holiday weekend - le Carre, so bleak in a good way, and I should have expected it .... but bloody bleak, all the same.

This week I have mainly been rereading American Gods in random chunks from wherever it happens to fall open. Finding it slightly odd that I can do this when I've only read it straight through once, six months or more ago, and I can't remember useful day to day stuff like the name of a colleague's PA.

Far, far too long since I've just read for every free minute (and some that weren't) .

Finally removed from the limbo of my laptop kindle reader to my phone so 'currently reading' has become a slightly more accurate description.

Can't believe how late I came to le Carre - or that I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed the arm's length narration of 'Harry' Palfrey.

Privileged to have an ARC, lucky that I didn’t try reading it in public ;) Proper review to follow.

So, that's everything in the house with an ISBN barcode scanned. *prowls restlessly, looking for barcodes*

I almost said that I'm only reading this because it came preloaded on my new dreaded app, but that's not quite true. I'm reading it because I opened it accidentally and I'm hooked.

Another thing that I'd somehow managed to forget about Chesterton, and I suppose it's related, is his willingness to describe a city street in the same loving detail more conventionally applied to a rural idyll, and with the same interest in the scene as a landscape, not just for the passing incidents occurring on it

Why have I been away so long from Gilbert Keith, a man with the rare ability to find romance and wonder in his own time and place?

"I feel like a migratory uterus just shat in my head." I have to remember that one next time I'm half hysterical with an oozy head cold

Gosh

"Woe to he who checkmates his opponent at last, only to discover they have been playing cribbage."

"But Unwin's apartment was smallish at best, and the world is unkind to the shoeless and frolicsome."

Wow. Just, wow. Never been tempted to give smoewthing five stars on the basis of the first page alone before

Hooked but torn, an amazing raw talent

Immediately intriguing.