Wednesday 29 July 2015

Reacher

We actually put our gas fire on for an hour the other night and the heating the following evening as the house felt so cold. It still does. I'm wearing four layers in July! What is the world coming to?
It is possible I feel it more today because I had a tooth removed yesterday. The actual in-the-chair procedure which finished around four o' clock wasn't so bad, but the evening was pretty dreary. In the end I took a couple of pain killers and went to bed.
I read half of a Jack Reacher novel last night and will finish it today as I'm taking life easy. This one is called Never Go Back and I picked it up from Ponteland library because I arrived at the dentists with 20 minutes to spare and walking there took my mind off the looming appointment. I don't know why I like Reacher novels, but I do. I first read one as an exercise to see how successful thriller writers do it, and got hooked on the story. Every time I read one - 61 Hours, Worth Dying For, The Affair, I gallop through to the end and then think how little attention I paid to the writing style.

But having read a few now, I can recognise a few  of his quirks. Detail is one of them, be it a description of a seedy motel or how to break someone's arm in an aeroplane toilet. The violence gets a lot of detail! If it is too gruesome, I can flick over it, but usually I don't because the victims are all baddies and somehow that makes it acceptable. Short sentences are another stylistic habit. There are a lot of short-sentence dialogues and short chapters. Cliff-hangers of varying intensity come at the end of each chapter, American life figures too, at varying levels but often the less well-off.


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