Love and Garbage by Ivan Klima and Rain by Don Paterson

I finally finished Love and Garbage by Ivan Klima last night: thank whatever deity you prefer for that blessed relief. It wasn't a bad book, so much as one that failed to engage me. That ten-a-penny, middle-aged, male, scared of mortality and in need of women to make it all better, yet women are simply two-dimensional cut-outs of his own mind, arrogant pseudo-intellectual, trope of fiction that increasingly frustrates me. For every paragraph or two that spoke to me - and there were a few of these - I had to wade through pages and pages of dense monotonous drivel. There is only one word for my response to it: boredom.

This was especially evident when compared with the immediate, involved way I responded to the previous book I read, Don Paterson's masterful collection Rain - incidentally the first collection of poetry I've ever read from cover to cover. That's the sort of literature I wish to read - engaging, playful, and jam-packed with memorable lines to mull over.

I'm glad there is still literature out there with which I can have that intense and memorable relationship. I was beginning to lose hope.

Full reviews of Love and Garbage and Rain will follow. Sometime. Probably.