Go on...

Bury your head in a good book!

I've been reading quite a lot recently - in fact, the moment I've finished one book, there's another on the shelf - there to entice me into it's ( usually fictional )world. This page is here to give other people a break from having to listen to me whine on and on about 83 good reasons why someone should read book X. You, lucky reader, now have the chance to take in my literary criticism, which - no doubt - after a little honing will hold up to the world's best... ( he says, fingers crossed. )

American Tabloid - James Ellroy

After seeing L.A. Confidential, I was so impressed by the strong storyline, that I went straight to a bookshop to buy something else by the author. In Confidential I really enjoyed the way that the storyline assumes that you had a brain, but at the same time you never got too lost in details. Tabloid didn't let me down either - I've read a few books on the JFK assassination, so it was good to be able to recognise a few of the names as they popped up ( quite a few of the names, in fact. ) More than that, though, was the way that the book is totally convincing, in that, although it is fiction, things could well have happened quite a lot like that at the time. Maybe JFK's womanizing is a bit overdone - I'll never know.

The book left me feeling half way through as if I should be reaching the end of any normal book, if that makes any sense. It just seemed to pack in twice as much story as a lot of these thrillers that I read. The fact that it was based around real people and real events just serve to make it more poignant and stinging. Yes it's violent; yes, there's profanity, but it just serves to define the time in which it was set. It just seems to be more real than the kind of fairytale view we have grown up with.

Apparently, it was Time's novel of the year ( 1995, I think ); in that case, it is well deserved, and if L.A. Confidential gets more people reading Ellroy, then so much the better.