Fashions change

I'm still in reading mode. Reading is definitely taking pride of place and writing has taken a bit of a back seat. Still doing it, but stealing every moment I can to read. So what has caught my imagination?
Well, Helen started it all with her gift of books for my birthday. Then I bought a copy of Sansom's Lamentations and I'm saving that up to read when I start writing Matho 2 since a) I really like Sansom's stories and style  b) his story and mine are set in almost the same year - 1544.

My reading list is nothing if not eclectic. The last few weeks has featured Ian McEwan, Tess Gerritsen, Robert Goddard, Lee Child, Hugh Howey, and Sarah J Bolton to name but a few. I've bought Ross Poldark by Winston Graham, first published 1945, in preparation for the tv series due to screen in March this year. Writing style will have changed since then. I wonder how he will compare?

It is an age since I ventured into a book shop. In actual fact, it is an age since I went into town or the Metrocentre. Buying things and having them delivered is so easy these days. Not what bookshops or any other kind of shop want to hear, but that's the way it goes.

I thought in the dark, dismal days after Christmas you might all appreciate a reminder of what summer looks like - so here you are - a shot across Blackhead Beach in Australia.

Fiction Failures

While I was in Zermatt I did a lot of reading - Kate Morton's Forgotten Garden, to be precise, and enjoyed it until I got to the very end and couldn't believe in the reason  the child was alone on the ship. I don't want to say more of the storyline, but those of you who have read it may agree with me. That mystery had been a thread throughout the whole book, and I wanted so very badly to know why it had happened.  I'm afraid the weak raison d'etre cast the entire story into doubt.
Then I read Goddard's Set in Stone. Again, a wonderfully atmospheric story about a house that twists people's minds, but then in the last few pages - a railway ticket in the post and I couldn't understand it's significance. I obviously ought to have understood - but I didn't.

 It is things like these that make me so very wary in own writing. Is the basic plot both strong and believable? Am I expressing character in the way I should? Is everything in my head clear on the page? Will readers close the book and toss it aside, saying Rubbish! because they couldn't figure out what was happening?

So now I've begun Trollope's The Other Family, and noticed something that has been annoying me for ages. It's the increasing frequency of sentences like this: "it was perfectly possible to hand-wash most stuff, not take it to the dry-cleaner's." I would rather the sentence read 'dry-cleaner.' Why add the apostrophe, which indicates the writer means the dry-cleaner's shop, if said writer cannot be bother to add the word itself?
I hope it is not the modern trend to write novels in the same sloppy, slangy way we speak. One of the things I love about reading is discovering the astonishing beauty of clear prose and I would hate to lose that for the sake of being trendy.

Zermatt - some hotels pick up guests from the Bahnhof (station) in carriages that look like the Wells Fargo stage in cowboy films. The thunder of hooves and rolling wheels as they trot down the snowy streets is exciting to watch, and then the whiff of horse as they go by -  wonderful!