I finished reading Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing a couple of days ago, and an excellent read it was as well. While not quite the flat-out masterpiece that most of the quotes on the cover imply, given that it's her first novel, I should imagine that within a few years, we will have a series of books from her which we can accurately describe as bona fide masterpieces on the basis of the writing and ambition shown here.
It's another novel which is basically a series of short stories, though in this case, each pair of stories is succeeded by another pair following the offspring of the people in the previous chapters. It starts in Ghana in the late 18th Century, with two half sisters who are unaware of each other's existence, and then follows their family lines over the next two centuries, through slavery, racism and a whole hell of a lot of white people being cunts. A brilliant read, even if I could do without the hokey contrivance of the last two descendents meeting and becoming lovers, as it was a pretty obvious outcome, but other than that, great stuff.
As work is full on at the minute, and I'm basically knackered all of the time, I'm spending the run up to Christmas re-reading a couple of old Bill Bryson books, as I need something familiar and not too heavy at the minute. Have just finished The Lost Continent, for about the tenth time, though it still makes me laugh, just in different places every time. When I first read it back in the early '90s, as a young man in my early 20s, I assumed that Bryson was a middle-aged man when he made the trip. Re-reading it, I see he was 36, so 11 years younger than I am now. It also struck me that, as with his update of 'Notes From A Small Island' with 'The Road To Little Dribbling', he could probably do a sequel to this to see how the US has changed in the last 30 years. I suspect there would be even more of it that he didn't like at this point.
