A tale of family ties
(Synopsis at end for those who can't be bothered to wade through the tale)

I've always been a keen reader; eldest child with no siblings to play with, back then TV was 3 channels and kids TV was on from 16:00 - 17:45 and my mother didn't let me watch ITV as it was "common"; Clive Sinclair still had hair so no computing either until I was 14. So I read.

There was one book* however which 'changed my life'. Or maybe I should say "had an impact on me which was more than the sum of its parts". It was called "Moon Palace" and was the first book I had read by Paul Auster, who's a reasonably well-known American writer. This was back 20 years ago though, so he was less famous (if he even is) then than he is now (this is fairly relevant to the story).

I read the book in a single sitting, and afterwards felt changed by it in some unfathomable way. It's hard to put into words what reading that book felt like afterwards; I suppose it was similar to how you see the world after the first time you take hallucinogens - it's the same, but slightly, subtly different. That's the only way to describe it - as if a filter that I had been looking through had changed; sorry for this sounding so vague, but regardless of my inability to detail it, it was a very strong feeling that I'd never had after reading anything else (wanking material aside, but that's a different type of feeling).

"So," you might ask "what the fuck was the book about then ? Did it teach you Dimac ? Bring you into another world ? Convince you to call yourself Loretta and have done with it ?"

Well, none of those things. You can read a synopsis here if you can be arsed.

Here's the (probably not all that interesting, but still) interesting bit.

I have a younger brother and sister who are French (Dad re-married a French woman). Completely independently of me, they both read "Moon Palace" and like me, felt that unlike any other book they had ever read, it had touched them in some way.

The significance of this for me was that, as we grew up separately and didn't have a language in common, there was not all that much that made us siblings, so to speak. We saw each other around once a year, got on very well but didn't feel like relatives, if that makes sense.

So, for whatever reason, "Moon Palace" is the book that unites me and my family.

It's well worth a read.


tl;dr version: blokes reads book he really like that is liked by his siblings as well.

* Iain M Banks "Consider Phlebas" was the nearest I've ever come to the impression "Moon Palace" made on me.
(TheImmortalJenkins, Thu 5 Jan 2012, 16:18, 1 reply)

try
Mt Vertigo by Paul Auster (if you have not by now). Worth a read and one of my favorites.
( sutit only the crumbliest, flakiest posts, Thu 5 Jan 2012, 17:54, closed)