One Day

I dislike endings, always have.  The end of a good book can put me in a funk for days.  Last night, I finished David Nicholls' One Day.  I enjoyed it so much that I read all the way through it in, well, one day.  It's Bridget Jones meets Anita Shreve and The Time Traveller's Wife.  OK, maybe I go in for the chick lit a bit too much, but it's clever-funny, it's bittersweet and it's plausible.  All good qualities, all qualities that I look for in a book.  The trouble is, now I'm in a funk.  I feel like I knew these people, the characters in this book.  They made me laugh like good mates down the pub on a warm Sunday afternoon, but they left abruptly, while I was in the toilet.

The other problem, of course, is what to read next.  I've got a week at the Shore coming up, and my book on oil politics and greed in the 21st century (The Squeeze, I recommend it as a way of answering the perennial question about why fuel prices are so high and why they sometimes swing wildly), while interesting and really well researched and written, seems a bit heavy to read on the beach.  Having read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, I could read the next installment in the Millenium series, The Girl Who Dropped Her Ice Cream Cone, or whatever it's called, but I'm not sure that's good beach material either as it requires paying attention.  I can't tolerate Dan Brown's writing, his dialog is trite, his characters are two dimensional and lack any discernible, consistent motivation, his prose is awkward.  I used to enjoy Tom Clancy, but he got to be rubbish too after the fourth or fifth book.  Michele's reading the Twilight series, but we don't have the first book with us, and besides, I'm not really sure I could actually read a teen vampire book without, at some point, thinking, "Seriously, Paul.  What the hell are you doing?"

I need something easy to read, with a good plot and a bit of humour, with characters I can identify with.  Maybe I'll reread One Day.