Further Reading

Visited Hokitika today, amongst other locations, a cool little town on the west coast, as the publicity would have it - and it's not far wrong. The fact that I bought Eleanor Catton's Booker winning The Luminaries in a bookshop there, the novel being set in the same location circa 1866, is testimony to a distinct sense of cool. Though I must confess, I was not aware of the novel or its setting until a couple of days ago, a testimony to my lack of literary cool.

Anyway, the novel looks like a winner, but it'll have to take its place in a waiting list that comprises itself and Charles Pallisers's The Unburied - which also looks like a sure-fire winner - that I'm only going to whittle down once Perec's Life A User's Manual is out of the way. Perec's crazily obsessive tome has turned out to be perfect holiday reading. There's no narrative thrust, and little in the way of obvious continuity, so I'm finding myself reading each seemingly separate segment in the spaces that emerge between holiday business. For some reason this appears to work perfectly, suiting both text and this reader's immediate circumstances.