Jim Duggan > Recent Status Updates

Not going as quickly as I’d hoped. The sledgehammer messaging is irritating. Are there really readers who never realised war can be a bit bad?

An easy book to read, in short chapters, but some annoying niggles. The author uses ‘rifle’ and ‘shotgun’ interchangeably, when the two are mutually exclusive. He also describes a specific car, and a character doing running handsprings over the bonnet, suggesting he has never actually seen the bonnet of this particular car, and uses some oddly ambiguous language that leaves the meaning unclear.

Enjoying this much more now, although I still believe there is a fundamental flaw in one book containing three stories, with all but one of the main character sharing the same names in each, and some lesser characters appearing in all three strands in varying degrees of closeness: as lovers, friends or strangers

Tricky, trying to keep the strands separate while maintaining continuity. It feels less like overlapping threads, more like completely separate stories sharing a space. Which, obviously, it should, but not this much imo.

Not a promising start, but it has picked up since.

The first few pages gave me Mrs Dalloway vibes - smug, self-centred people, cosseted by wealth and privilege - but I’m relaxing into it.

100 pages to go. It’s good when the end is in sight. Four days max.

The bugs are starting to irritate me now. The naive protagonist, the “too complicated to explain, but basically”, the “this will destroy x, y and a, but as long as it saves humans …”.

Sooooo good!