The reason I'm a few days late with this week's book is because I was on a holiday in Egypt. Internet access is quite restricted there and pricey as well. That does not mean I did not finish the book well before Sunday. That's the benefit of lying on the beach all week.
This week's choice of beach read was Iain Bank's Walking On Glass. Not a very light novel in the sense that it's difficult to understand what it's about. The separate stories are easy to read and quite enticing. One is about Graham, whose in love with a girl and in his chapters he is on his way to her while he reminisces about their past. The next story is about Steven Grout a paranoid person who believes he is under constant threat to be attacked by the Microwave Gun. He believes he is from another world. Then the third story is about Quiss who is a war criminal. Together with Ajayi he has to solve puzzles inside a science fiction castle to get out.
I guess you have to have one foot settled deeply in SF to actually understand what this book is about and how deeply this stories correlate. For me they were just pleasant to read and apart from the fact that the first story is quite disturbing, they did not really mean that much to me, but according to the Literary Encyclopedia the author slightly agrees: "Iain Banks commented that the book didn’t do exactly what it set out to do and I think you have failed to an extent if the reader can’t understand what you’re saying. I worry sometimes that people will read Walking on Glass and think in some way I was trying to fool them, which I wasn’t."
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