the last book I read

The Rain Before It Falls by Jonathan Coe.

Well, fuckety fuckety fuckety bollocky fuck. I wrote a comprehensive and perceptive review of this fucking book, in my usual inimitable idiom, being careful to hit the "Save Now" button at regular intervals along the way, and now Blogger has fucked itself up the arse, crashed, and eaten the fucker. Fuck. First time for everything, I suppose.

I may, at some point in the future, feel inclined to return and retype some of my thoughts, but my feeling at the moment is: fuck it, I'm not doing the whole fucking thing again. Here's the Independent and Guardian reviews instead.

Here's the one-paragraph version, which some of you may even prefer anyway: Gill's aunt Rosamond dies, by her own hand it turns out, but not before whe's recorded a load of tapes for her long-lost relative Imogen. Imogen can't be found, so Gill ends up listening to the tapes, which chronicle Rosamond's friendship with Imogen's grandmother Beatrix, and the story of Beatrix's daughter Thea (Imogen's mother). It's short (though this is sneakily concealed by some comically large print, like here and here) and pretty grim and depressing. If you wanted an even shorter version you could just try Philip Larkin's poem This Be The Verse, as read by the author here. If you want a Coe (and why wouldn't you, as he's generally very good) I would start with The House Of Sleep.