''Travels in the Scriptorium'', Paul Auster

I would like to extend my thanks to Paul Auster for enabling me to feel like a proper grown-up. As frequenters of this blog (um, anyone out there?) no doubt realised long ago, my approach to literature and reading is hardly sophisticated. A nice book cover, a decent review in The Guardian and I'm anyone's. I have also not read half the things that I feel I 'should' have. I was an avid bibliophile until around 12, stopped reading anything non-academic until about 19, and then re-started, somehow circumventing that delicate adolescent stage when one is meant to wallow in The Classics. No, it was straight to Douglas Coupland for me. However, being an ardent fan of Auster has helped redeem me somewhat. A respectable, intellectual, author, who I like! And of whose books I have read many! 

Harvard Book Store's bargain basement provided me with my latest fix, and as luck would have it, both a credible book and a great cover (white horses rock). Definitely one of his more esoteric and philosophical novels, ''Travels'' is set in a white room in an unknown location with a protagonist who knows as little as we do. There was a war; he is amnesiac; he may or may not be being held against his will. There's something of the Sherlock Holmes 'mystery of the locked room' about it, and Auster also quickly introduces another of his signature motifs, the book-within-a-book. It all sounds a bit pretentious and obscure, but thanks to Auster's great prose style, a certain amount of plot development and, admittedly, the novella format, it kept me interested. I am tempted to explain my own theories as to what was going on, but on the slight offchance someone actually reads this, and then decides to read the book, I shall refrain. But if you read it, let me know, and we can compare notes whilst feeling like grown-ups.