Authors Electric

Goodbye and good riddance, February 2016. You were a hideous month, a month that robbed us of two great writers: Umberto Eco and Harper Lee. I’m not going to attempt a critique of Eco’s and Lee’s respective contributions to literature – that’s already been done, and done far better than I could do it. This is just a very small personal tribute to two writers who made a big difference to me. It’s a small, belated ‘thank you’ to two people I’ll never be able to thank in person. Umberto Eco. Image credit: Bogaerts, Rob / Anefo | Wikimedia Commons I gobbled up Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose in just a few sittings. It was for this mediaeval murder mystery, of course, that Eco was best known, at least in the English-speaking world. The novel was an instant, international success, and I like to believe that this was – at least in part – because Eco, in these dumbed-down times, never underestimated his readers’ intelligence. He was an unabashed intellectual, a professor of ...

So – December 2012. Is the world going to end in a few weeks? Is it worth buying any Christmas presents, or will the shops be full of Christmas Eve shoppers grabbing last minute gifts when they realise that really they don’t have a valid excuse after all? I love a good conspiracy theory. From Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code , I’ve been lapping them all up. It may not be the best-written book in the world, but I can’t say I noticed as the plot fascinated me. I love to go off and actually look at pictures of The Last Supper and see if I agree with Brown’s interpretations. For me, the key to a good story of this type is the plausibility of the plot. I’m willing to believe, I want to go with the author; it doesn’t take much to hook me in, but get it wrong – tell me something I know for a fact cannot be true –   and you’ve lost me forever. Take vampires for instance. I can suspend disbelief enough to acknowledge their existence in fiction – but having children? Nope, that’s crossed...