The Wire boxset is mothballed for now, as this is my slightly intimidating current reading list. I'm looking forward to all of them in different ways, but at this rate I won't have time to read Grow Your Own Veg, let alone grow any. I'm currently (well, obviously not currently) knee-deep in Richard Powers' Generosity. It's proving light relief after the dark melancholy of reading two parts of David Peace's Tokyo crime trilogy back-to-back, which I very much enjoyed but made me feel the need for a bath every time I finished a chapter. I was reading them in prep for an interview with Peace, which I admit to being slightly intimidated by (as you would speaking to anyone who has revelled in so much murder). But Peace was such an engaging, interesting man - and just as appalled by his subject matter as me, it seemed.
Anyway, back to Powers. He's much more of a straight thriller writer than Peace, but with a twist in that he's interested in science and technology. So interested in fact, that he dictates his novels to speech recognition software rather than writes them. Generosity is by no means a literary thriller but it does revel in ideas - it's about finding a gene for happiness and what that might mean for the world.
Talking of happiness, I was really pleased to see my interview with Colm Toibin in The National today. Brooklyn was my favourite novel of last year and it was great to see it win the Costa Novel award. You can read the piece as it was printed, below.
The Review
15 Jan 2010
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