2666 leaves me with just one more of the '100 essential novels' to read that I started all those years ago. It's a great big wodge of a book which has been staring at me from the book pile on top of the chest of drawers since before lockdown started. I decided not to attempt it or the other remaining book, William Gaddis' The Recognitions during lockdown, as life is hard enough! as many critics have said, it can be seen not as one book but as five separate books, and all stood alone as reads that gripped me and kept me interested. the exception was the core of the novel, which at times turned into a list of horrific murders of women in Northern Mexico. hugely ambitious though, and it has made me want to read more of his work. On the others, yet another book about the Habsburgs and that glorious lost mitteleuropa they represent, of ceremony, inefficiency, polyglotism, open borders, railways, regalia and refusal to adjust to the modern world. Steinbeck's East of Eden was an epic, I love reading his work and this may be the best. I'll have to reread The Grapes of Wrath. At home, the mismanagement of COVID means the UK now has the highest death rate in the world and we are in a 'mockdown' when we are all meant to stay at home, but people are still working, kids are still going to school and shops are still open.
