Friday, December 18, 2015

Late Night Reading


The two books currently hidden beneath my bed covers are Ghostwritten by David Mitchell and God's Secretaries by Adam Nicolson. 

The first is a novel and the second is nonfiction. Both are beautifully written. An excerpt from Ghostwritten:

There's a police office he could go and scare, but I took Suhbataar straight to the museum to enquire after Bodoo. The door was locked, but Suhbataar can open any door in Mongolia. Inside was similar to the last museum, booming with silence. Suhbataar found the curator's office empty. A large, stuffed buzzard incorrectly labeled as a condor hung down from the ceiling. One of its glass eyes had dropped and rolled away somewhere.

An excerpt from God's Secretaries:

The state church could not tolerate the freedom or the priestlessness of such behaviour. Many Separatists - and they were overwhelmingly young, idealisitic people, a tiny minority, perhaps no more than a couple of hundred in England as a whole - fled to the Netherlands but others were arrested and, eventually, some fifty-two were held for long periods in the string of hideous London gaols: the Clink, the Gatehouse, the Fleet, Newgate, the Counter Woodstreet, the Counter Poultry, Bridewell and the White Lion, some of the prisoners shut in the "most noisome and vile dungeons', without 'bedds, or so much as straw to lye upon . . . and all this, without once producing them, to anie Christian triall where they might have place given them, to defend themselves'. One of them, the eighteen-year-old Roger Waters, was kept in irons for more than a year.

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