Have moved on from Red Harvest to Player Piano, Vonnegut's first novel. It's not my favourite of America's finest successor to Twain, I don't think he really gets into his stride until The Sirens of Titan, but since I've now got all the early stuff in the LoA editions I might as well get a sense of his development and read sequentially. I'm fairly sure that when I first read him as a callow teenager (me, not Kurt) I kicked off with Cat's Cradle and assumed pure genius came naturally thinking badly of PP because it seemed so ordinary. Now I'm looking for continuities.
Actually I'm glad to get away from Hammett for a short breather. Don't get me wrong, I love all the novels, but they are intense in a manner that's quite forbidding. Once you get passed the manner, the sheer style of Red Harvest you realise an awful lot of blood has been spilled and at some level this is meant entirely seriously.
Another short novel I'm quite glad to have come to an end of is P.J. Kavanagh's period piece for children, or teenagers rather, Scarf Jack. It's a worthy enough effort at writing in the Kidnapped, Moonfleet, vein of boys' adventure, but it feels curiously laboured for a relatively modern effort - being published at the end of the 70s. The action bits are readable enough, but it gets more than a little bogged down in thematic concerns related to Irish history Anyway, I'm moving onto one of Mary Norton's Borrowers series in my reading of kids' stuff. I need a bit of charm.
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