spectrum

Twenty-Fifteen: I’m doing something I’ve been putting off for far too long. I’m getting serious about reading, again. I’ve dusted off my paperbacks and charged up my Kindle. It’s time to take the time to feed my poor television-adled brain with a selection of healthy, nourishing fiction. So, read on, little brain. Read on. We’re going Book to the Future!

We had this book sitting quietly on our shelf, waiting to be read, I having picked it up from the discount rack at the bookstore a few days previously. Karin says to me one day having spotted it there: “Why did you buy THAT book?”

Uh… what? Then I got it…

“Because it’s not THAT book.” I said (or something along those lines.) “It’s another book. Not THAT book.” And all the while wondering if author Jasper Fforde is laughing with tented fingers, or crying himself to sleep each night, because he happened to have released a book with a wee, single, tiny word of difference of title to that of another much more widely-read, if likely much less regarded, novel than his own.

That said, his novel is not (yet) a feature film.

That also said, this is the first time I’ve ever used the dust jacket from another book to hide what I’m reading from prying eyes on the train.

So, that’s a really roundabout way of saying I’m not reading THAT book. I’m reading “Shades of Grey” by Jasper Fforde, author of many postmodern fantasy-type novels, including this one, set in what seems (from –actual– dustjacket description and the opening chapters, at least) to be a post-apocalyptic dystopian novel set around the idea that in the future, some people are just better than others… and we know that because they can see a bigger chunk of the spectrum than the rest. The riff-raff see in just shades of grey.

So you know that’s gonna be a problem.