Day: December 28, 2020

Book review: The Plague

The Plague by Albert Camus.
My rating: 5 of 5 stars.

The Plague mightn’t have inspired a Cure song, but that doesn’t mean you should discount it. I mean, is it on the nose to be reading something with this title in 2020? It feels a little on the nose, but here I am, ploughing through Camus’s 1947 examination of the effects of bubonic plague on a city because frankly, there’s not much else to do in 2020 other than to try and avoid disease by any means necessary, as others seem hell-bent on playing chicken with it.

Camus: possibly anti-mask, but definitely pro-ciggie.

(Well. I suppose I could’ve come up with a radio adaptation and recorded it remotely but I guess I don’t have the funding or the spark of the BBC, so reading it was about all I can stretch to.)

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Book review: Nightmares

Nightmares: Three Great Suspense Novels by Ira Levin.
My rating: 5 of 5 stars.

Ira Levin. You know the guy: novelist, playwright and the man whose stories became adapted into a dozen or so films, from Sliver to The Boys From Brazil. A jobbing writer, whose tight planning is a thing of wonder.

Why yes, I do have an Edgar award as well as this father fetching pullover. And I wrote The Stepford Wives.

Nightmares is a collection of three of Levin’s novels in one book club-style hardback. It’s something that I came across in an op shop in a small town in the middle of the country, which is probably fitting because each of the stories are about people fitting in – or trying to fit in – to a community.

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