Slipping Away

Happily getting a fair bit of reading done. The second volume of American Fantastic Tales in the fine Library of America edition is slipping down a treat. Nothing terribly frightening yet, but lots of style from the likes of Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams.

And slipping down with even greater ease, to the extent that I finished it in two sittings, Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger proved to be both very funny and distinctly disturbing - a good mix. I suppose its most disturbing quality, from the point of view of this reader, was the degree that I found myself enjoying the utterly immoral success of its protagonist at the end of the novel. The underdog biting back has a sort of energising quality. I suspect real social change for the better feeds more on this than the efforts of its more worthy proponents.