Me: I know that you don’t like salad now, but maybe you’ll like salad when you grow-up.
Her: Maybe.
Me: I didn’t like lettuce when I was little but I’m very fond of it now. Do you think you will be?
Her: Hello? Mummy, I am only four and a half, you know.
Nablopomo
F is for Fforde, Fielding and Fonseca. It turns out that A is for Adams also – thank you C, for pointing that out.
C suspects that my bookshelves are in alphabetical order. Well, sort of, unfortunately, my otherwise brilliant cleaner has a reprehensible habit of reorganising books by size. Onwards.
Jaspar Fforde author of the Thursday Next books. I started off on book 1 with wild enthusiasm but I got less and less enthused and my interest in literature’s oddest police force eventually disappeared by volume 4.
Helen Fielding, author of the Bridget Jones books. You may sneer but they’re clever and funny.
Isabel Fonseca wrote “Bury me standing” and it is one of the best books I have ever read. I’m not a great fan of non-fiction (it’s too much like work) but this book is superb. It exposed to me my own prejudices against travellers and gypsies (I had been secure in my own prejudices and never noticed them) and introduced me to a whole other world.
Douglas Adams, you know “Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and so on; great fun, well thumbed.
I keep thinking I ought to read Thursday Next but haven’t done it yet.
Have you ever read Richard Ford? The Sportswriter is smart and funny and interesting. And, if you like it, there are sequels, which is nice.
Sebastian Faulks wrote Birdsong, which fetaured in the top 5 or ten of the 100 Best Books Ever, but is really just a rip-off of Pat Barker/Robert Graves. I’ve recently read William Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury, which is very cleverly constructed but a bit bewildering (even with the helpful foreward) as there are two characters with the same name but different sex and this doesn’t become clear for AGES so that you feel you have to re-read it immediately to make sense of the “plot”, and frankly there are too many other books out there to bother. I alos found John Fowles bewildering, but probably cos he’s not for teenage girls.