Promising ...

I have been reading The Better Maker by Walter Aske (a.k.a., elberry). I started it last week, when I took to my bed because I was feeling so lousy. Now I'm a little more than a third of the way through, and I'm enjoying it. It has its rough edges, but they're no big deal. The protagonist, Patrick Sadler, reminds me a bit of my younger self - though I was always more circumspect - and the conversations Patrick has with the Viking and the Saint - fellow students at the university he is attending - remind me some of the absurd riffs my fellow students and I used to engage in when I was in college so many eons ago. Polly, the girl Patrick is in love with - he calls it the Torment - hasn't really come into focus yet, but that's because Patrick hasn't really had the nerve to get to know her. But Sini, the Finnish tutor, is quite intriguing. I guess what I like about the book is that it doesn't take itself too seriously and the absurdist conversations are often genuinely funny, as are Patrick's frequently bizarre observations, as in this description of Sini in the Safeway:

He watched her expertly bag her fruit and bread. She moved with economy. Pretty as if by accident. And that long tweed coat, a genteel earthy brown under the harsh supermarket lights, grey-speckled. He imagined her stealing or inheriting it from an eccentric relation, pockets full of clock parts, diodes, and bird feathers.

The sensibility that informs that final sentence is what drives this book. And so far at least, I find it appealing.