Fiction reading

[Nano]

I don't know about you, but me, no matter how many movies I see, I still read a lot of books. In the last years, however, non-fiction books are going up in my bedside table (I also developed a taste for documentary films). Maybe it's age related? I always wondered why, in a family with rooms filled with libraries, my fathers and uncles read much less (if anything) than my brother and I. Maybe the burdens of adult life take us to less fantasy consuming? I don't know.

One thing I DO know is that adults tend to cherish escapism fiction, and specially comedy, for the same reasons we like to watch late-night shows like Letterman: to laugh and go to bed with less worries. As opposed to my young and effortless years, when I choosed the stories with more "conflict" and drama. Of course I'm making a big overlook here. (I have a couple of uncles that still read, but only crime novels.)

Anyway, I want to know if you're reading some book and what that is. Me, now I'm chewing at the last Peter Biskind (EASY RIDERS, RAGING BULLS) pulp-movie journalism tale, DOWN AND DIRTY PICTURES, basically the story of Sundance and Miramax and the U.S. indie film phenomenon of the 90s.

But just before this one, I read a huge novel by British-Japanese author Kazuo Ishiguro. It's called THE UNCONSOLED and has some years now. I feared it a bit because of the length and cuz I knew it was a detour from his first books like THE REMAINS OF THE DAY. But quelle surprise, I really liked it. A very famous pianist arrives to a Mitteleuropa small city for a prestigious concert and sees himself inmersed in a lot of small problems that ruin the town and its people. The thing is that it plays like a dream, with the guy getting in and out of trouble in rather fantastic ways, and also playing the usual feelings we have when dreaming (being lost or abandoned, chased, misunderstood, etc.) Something really strange, like Kafka taking acid at times. If you can tolerate the ultra-slow pace and the hyper-educated manners of the characters, and the fact that the story for the most part leads nowhere, it's really something else.