Feeling nicely relaxed and chilled after a week in Tuscany with Grace, Oliver and Abi, so before Real Life intrudes again on Monday I thought I’d do an old-fashioned “here look I went on holiday look at me!” photo post:
Florence
Witches’ Brew, (Mint Based) Poker Chips and Cards
We’ll always have gelato
So this was weird…
Hot tub
The final ingredient to any holiday, not pictured above, is obviously reading. I’ve been back in a good reading groove of late, and this holiday managed Zadie Smith’s new novel NW, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Life Of Pi. A word about this last one. I vaguely remember when everyone was reading it, roughly a decade ago, so was slightly disappointed all these years later to discover that the world had not in fact been gripped by a mathematical treatise. Disappointment hardened into disdain for the first section, set in India, which is a tedious ode to religion interspersed by the kind of ‘wonderings’ worthy of Elizabeth Gilbert. Thankfully, the bulk of the novel is a great yarn, including plenty of tense moments, a genuinely creepy episode on an island and a deft ending, so after a while I was actually a happy and captivated reader again.
But, Yann Martel, please: you don’t understand agnosticism. Really, really, not at all. And if people were so blown away by the philosophy of Life Of Pi, then it strikes me that they don’t either. Which is a shame, is all.
