Jacket Notes
Iarrive home from the book launch with a new love interest. Maybe it was the wine. I shouldn’t have had that second glass, we all know how it lowers the defences. Not that that’s any excuse. I know it was entirely my doing. Be that as it may, here I am with not one, but two ... shall we say ... prospects.
The one was a given, I knew I was going to purchase the launch book,
The Season of Glass, the new novel by Rahla Xenopolous. But then the bookstore owner, who knows me and my weakness so well, said, “That book you were asking about just came in.”
It is Less, by Andrew Sean Greer, and it’s fresh and new, all decked out
with the gold stamp of the Pulitzer Prize 2018. The very many cover shouts are glowing and there’s the word “hilarious” — nothing does it for me like hilarious — and then “bedazzling” and “endearing”. I take both books. I get home and clamber over the mountain of unread and partially read books that I believe was, some time in the early 2000s, a small bedside table. On top is my avowed current partner —
Ken Barris’s award-winning
The Life of Worm & Other Misconceptions.
Ooh, I love it.
Properly, deeply love it. Wouldn’t leave it for anything. But this wouldn’t be leaving. It is a short story collection, and short story collections are by definition polyamorous. They don’t mind if you go off and frolic in other pastures for a bit. In fact, they expect it. After a dalliance, I find that I return to the relationship with renewed interest and delight.
Having made peace with a small break from Worm (it’s not you, it’s me, I tell him) I read the first few pages of
The Season of Glass. You have to read the first pages on the night of the book launch. It’s the done thing. Well, it’s my done thing. The book’s a beauty, really a knock-out, but I’m not shallow, I don’t want to objectify my new love interest. It’s marvellous on the inside, too and though it’s early days, it feels like we’ve got something going.
This morning, when honest to God I should be working and not mucking around in bed with strange new books, I spot Less.
In the spirit of research and professionalism (I am after all a book reviewer, and we have responsibilities),
I open it up. Just a page or two. To see what all the fuss is about. I won’t lie. I’m intrigued.
Help me, then, with the eternal question of the reader — who’s going to get lucky tonight?