Reading Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close off the back of The Remains of the Day was pretty odd, because I changed from the voice of an old man to that of a nine year old boy (amongst letters of various others), but after I'd got into the swing of this novel I absolutely loved it. What I liked most about it was possibly that it wasn't just prose, Foer had various other ways of telling the story such as photographs and letters- my favourite were the excerpts detailing what was written by the man in the novel who couldn't speak, to show how he communicated with other people. I think I probably enjoyed this so much because it reminded be of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events in which he did similar things.
I don't really have much of note to say about this read, it was hard to concentrate on specific details of it because I read so much whilst on the train from here to home and visa versa, and I always seem to get distracted easily when reading on trains. Despite this, I did find it ridiculously compelling, and wanted to read it all of the time which is always nice! I also found it strange, but nice, that I was able to identify with a nine year old boy, his grandmother, and a non-speaking 'renter' simultaneously- making the novel even more enjoyable. I'm still not quite sure where (or who from) I found out about Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, but I'm so glad I did- and I'm really looking forward to reading another of his novels: Everything is Illuminated. But next on the menu is Stoner by John Williams.
(apologies, this seems to be turning into a bit of a book review blog as opposed to anything else- but I've been doing very little other than reading recently! But I am planning a few trips such as one to Pie and Vinyl in Portsmouth so I will be writing about them as soon as they happen.)
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