On Clocks

If this were a twitter post, I would use the hashtag “#fridayreads” I suppose.

But this isn’t twitter. I imagine the millions of people who read this every few seconds armed with pitchforks and torches, shouting “We want content!”

I’m reading Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway. Harkaway has the unfortunate burden of being John le Carre’s son, but he seems to have taken up the mantle with some amount of panache.

Reading the book and spending time with it makes me wonder, though, whether or not I should be reading something more classic or literary. Harkaway deals in crooked cops and made up cults and sons of gangsters – all of which could be classic, but it doesn’t smell classic to me. I am not the type who can put down a book in the middle, so I won’t put this down, but it makes me wonder.

Fiction, what I want to write, what I write already, what I hope to contribute a book to, needs all the readers it can get. Reading only classics means reading literature that everyone has already formed an opinion on – you’re just playing catch up. No one has written a song or named a band after Nick Harkaway’s book yet, but maybe it’s just a waiting game.

Angelmaker sounds like an excellent name for a band.