Yesterday I was trawling through all the posts I've put up on here since the very beginning, which I discovered to my astonishment was actually 27 September 2006, almost exactly five years ago. I was just reading my old reviews and was interested to see how my reading habits, and my reviewing habits, have changed in that time. I didn't actually start reviewing seriously and frequently until early 2007, and one of the first books I reviewed was The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld, which I seem to have liked quite a lot -- along, I may add, with almost a million other people in this country alone.
Anyway, though I didn't remember a great deal about this novel, when I spotted Rubenfeld's follow-up in an airport bookstore, I thought it would be a perfect way to pass a nine-hour flight. In actual fact I hardly read any of it on the plane as I spent most of my time either eating or watching X Men movies (the prequel and the first two, in case you are interested) which I'd never seen before and enjoyed enormously. So Jed had to wait till I got home, and then I was frightfully jetlagged and reading became a real strain as I kept falling asleep. This partly explains why, after getting back to the UK almost 6 days ago, I am still only two thirds of the way through this novel. Partly but not completely -- as to tell the truth I am finding it really boring and not at all well written -- it kept reminding me of Dan Brown, not a good thing at all. Certainly it is interesting historically -- like his first novel, this one is based on real events, in this case a (still) unexplained terrorist bomb which exploded in the centre of New York City in 1920. Once again Sigmund Freud appears, as do many other real people, and we meet again Stratham Younger, the charismatic young psychologist, this time in pursuit of a beautiful French radiologist called Colette. So there's lots in here about psychoanalysis and the early use (or misuse) of radium. But I'm just not enthralled and am getting irritated with it all, though of course I do want to find out about the three red-headed women who keep appearing in front of Colette, and I do want to know if Freud is going to be able to cure Colette's little brother of his inability to speak. I think skipping and skimming is called for here.
What struck me forcibly about my earlier reading habits was how much my tastes have changed since 2007. In those early days I was mostly reading recently published novels, and now I hardly ever do. Almost all my reading now is of novels published in the middle years of the twentieth century and I can't seem to get enough of them. As for my reviews, the early ones were much briefer and, to me, not nearly as interesting. So blogging has honed my critical abilities, I think -- and let's hope it goes on doing so.
