The guy sitting kind of diagonally opposite me is reading something by H P Lovecraft. I wonder if he has read Alan Moore's "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier", which includes a section that is essentially a P G Wodehouse story written in the style of Lovecraft. It is, unsurprisingly, very well done, and very clever. As for Lovecraft himself: nah; he is way too overblown and turgid, if you ask me, for his stories ever to creep out from the dense thickets of his language.
The woman right in front of me is not far into David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas", which I have written about before. I hope she gets further into it than I was ever able to. The novel he wrote next, "Black Swan Green", awaits me in the local library, as soon as I get through William Gibson's "Spook Country", which I am having to tear through in the expectation that some other bugger will have reserved it.
The woman in front of her is reading John Birmingham's "He Died With A Felafel In His Hand", a novel that I can thoroughly recommend, about the shared-household experience, growing up, a mysterious death, and bucket bongs. The movie is good, too, something I don't often say about Australian movies. Adrienne is currently reading the sequel, "The Tasmanian Babes Fiasco", which she gave me a couple of birthdays ago and, true to form, is reading first.
You might think that the quality of reading material is unusually high for public transport. And you may well be right. But perhaps it says something about the nature of Canberra. Or else it was just a fluke.
