It’s Read-Along day! Me and Sophie have had this read-along planned for a few months now. For two reasons. 1) We just like discussing books with each other. 2) We both really needed to get How To Be Both read. In the next week, we will be posting daily updates of our opinions on the best seller by Ali Smith for you to keep up with what we’re reading.
If you haven’t heard of How To Be Both or pay no attention to the best sellers lists of 2014/2015, here is a little bit about the novel:
How to be both is a novel all about art’s versatility. Borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it’s a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There’s a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There’s the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real – and all life’s givens get given a second chance.
I’ve been excited to get in to this for a very long time. I wouldn’t say its my usual novel, and i’m a little nervous going in to it (there’s no speech marks in the writing, that’s something that really bothers me) but at the point of writing this i am 27 pages in and enjoying it so far.
I must say, you need a bit of time to get in to it. I’m not fully invested in George’s life yet, and i’m not entirely sure where this novel is going to go, but i’m all good to carry on the rest of the week.
The main reason i wanted to do this read-along is because of the incredible thing’s i’ve heard about this novel. It will probably be counted as a modern classic one day, and i want to see what the hype is about. Tomorrow is Sophie’s turn, and hopefully she will be able to give you a little more information about the novel and her thoughts as she gets a little further in!
Happy reading!
The Little Contemporary Corner 