Where Have All The Fun Books Gone?

Ok, so I'm still alive, still reading, just not blogging much lately.  I apologize for that, and I really am honestly going to work at getting back into a rhythm of posting more frequently.  I've been craving a really fun book, something with magic and demons and romance... I don't think I'm going to find that in the Man Booker Prize list, and that's a bit depressing.  I'm trying to accept that if I want to read anything 'fun' before September I'm really going to have to read faster!

I finished reading Kazuo Ishiguro's "The Remains of the Day" on April 18th - another book that took me longer than strictly necessary, 14 days in total.  I found the novel a bit boring, to be completely honest, the sort I had to really work at wanting to read. It isn't badly written, by any means - it's quite beautiful, actually. I simply wasn't engaged by the narration. It's written as memoir posing as a travel log - the elderly butler of an English house is given a short vacation, during which he drives across Britain to reconnect with a former employee of the house in hopes of winning her back.  There were aspects of Stevens, the narrator, which I identify with, such as his difficulty with "banter" or small talk, and the idea of a professional persona that doesn't really reflect one's true self - the 'work appropriate' self. The problem for me, with the narrator speaking in this professional voice, is that I could only speculate as to what the character truly felt and thought.  I get that that was the intention, I just didn't like it.  I will probably try another Ishiguro novel in the future, because I didn't dislike the novel, I just didn't love it either.

I'm already eleven chapters into the next novel, A.S. Byatt's "Possession: A Romance" - it's pretty interesting so far, although some of the language choices in the faux-19th century poetry are a bit obscure for me.  The 20th century portion of the story, which involves a pair of scholars discovering and researching the letters of a pair of 19th century poets, feels a bit forced - it seems to me that the story was just a delivery method for the poetry.  I haven't read anything else by Byatt and I'm not even half-way through this novel so I may be way off-base on this, but that's how it's reading to me right now.  I'm hoping the 20th century plot line doesn't turn out as predictably as is seems, but I feel confident that the 19th century plot has some surprises in store.

Happy reading!