2011 Project365 (day110)

Date: 20 April 2011 20:37:03

This is my current reading (when I'm not reading essays of varying standards, that is!). The Nick Hornby book is my current book group book, it's nice and easy to read and I'll finish it in time for book group discussion (so it might snow in May, sorry about that). It's the story of a young lad from north London whose mum had him as a teenager, and who then goes and gets a girl pregnant. There have been a couple of points where I've laughed out loud while reading it, and while I wouldn't say it was side-splitting it is quite wry humour. I've not read any Nick Hornby before, but it strikes me as my kind of holiday reading. I'm just at the point where they're trying to figure out how to tell their respective parents, I'm not sure how it pans out - even though I could see the getting-the-girl-pregnant bit coming a mile off, the rest of it hasn't been particularly predictable. And his dim skating friend Rabbit really makes me laugh. The one below it is an academic book, but once I'd got past the rather heavy first bit I'm really enjoying it. Maybe one day I'll be able to write like this :) It's set in Cluj, where I stayed in Romania when I was at the language school, so I like that I can picture it while I'm reading. It's about the everyday experience of ethnicity in Cluj (an ethnically mixed city), in the context of some very overt nationalist politicking (Cluj's former mayor was a particularly rabid Romanian nationalist; when I stayed in Romania back in the mid-90s I lived with some Hungarian doctors, and whenever this mayor came on the TV they would be shouting and ranting at the telly). This is one of a handful of academic books I have read which show you can be thorough in your scholarship, but still thoroughly readable (it's this book if you can't make it out from the photo and are interested).