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Thursday 30 October 2014

#BookADayUK; A Reader Event For October. Day 30

The penultimate day of the Books Are My Bag.com promotion for independent bookshops. I hope it's encouraged lots of readers to support these bastions of literature and entertainment.

Today's theme is 'Favourite experimental book'.  Not something I've ever been really keen on. Most such volumes turn out to be more or less unreadable or incomprehensible. I have no problem with the artist allowing him/herself some freedom in the manner of expression, of course. But language, and therefore writing, is a means of communication and it seems to me that w work of literature that fails to communicate is ineffective.
So, I won't cite James Joyce's Ulysses, here. I started to read it and gave it up as a bad job, much like his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which I found decidedly self-absorbed and puerile.

Instead, I'll nominate the rather charming, if slightly cheesy, Jonathan Livingston Seagull. It was, at the time, an interesting idea, portraying the story through words and pictures on different types of paper and in different ways. I recall enjoying it at the time, though that was a very long time ago and, for reasons I won't bore you with, I no longer have the book.

If you haven't come across it and can find a copy, it's certainly worth a read.

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