Artist of the Floating World

Tuesday 27th of March

I’ve been to book group tonight. It was a very nice affair compromising of Dave, Polly, Stephanie, Danielle, Katie, Matt and Kaylord. It also compromised of a nice shandy in the pub followed by some delicious Japanese food (sadly they didn’t seem to be able to serve everyone at once and it arrived every 5 minutes) in Aki on Gray’s Inn Road.

The book this month was ‘An Artist of the Floating World’ by Ishiguro. Now strike me down but I have never read ‘Remains of the Day’ and this book hasn’t put me off, but it could have done. The writing is beautiful but to be honest I didn’t like the book. Only Matt and Katie really liked the book that much. Everybody else felt a bit half hearted about the whole affair. Any book that has a first chapter of over 90 words is bound to put me off. I like to stop reading at the end of a chapter not halfway or a quarter of the way through.

We had a few heated debates, particularly on the whole idea of patriotism. I zoned out a bit. I don’t like the sound of my own voice (well not always) but I couldn’t get a word in anywhere so went a bit into myself which isn’t like me.

Ended up in McDonalds with Danielle, having an apple pie each and a gossip. Not a bad night!