Reading Pile: Black Swan Green, David Mitchell

I took two weeks off work recently, to attend WorldCon, and to finish the second draft if my book.

WorldCon was great. I gave my first ever public reading, and was on my first ever convention panel. It was a rare opportunity to see some of the big names of sci fi in the flesh: Robert Silverberg, Kim Stanley Robinson, George RR Martin, China Mielville, Cory Doctorow. The downside was being reminded how little of these writer's work I've actually read.

The novel redraft went less well. Didn't get it finished, didn't submit it to the Scribe Publishing competition. I need to sort out some major structural problems, and I've been bashing my head against it for too long to think clearly. So I've decided to put the book aside for a few weeks, and come back to it in October.

Which gives me time to catch up on my reading.

I have a foot high to-read pile. Birthday presents have only added to it. The first book off the pile, though, was one I started several months ago, then put aside to work on my novel:


David Mitchell's Black Swan Green.

David Mitchell (the author, not the comedian) is a rising star of the English literary scene. His debut novel Ghostwritten set his style: overlapping stories, a multitude of voices, a hint of sci fi. Cloud Atlas is his must-read work, epic, clever, a Russian doll of a novel, spanning from the Pacific Ocean in the 1850s to a distant post-apocalyptic future and back again.

Black Swan Green is more intimate in scope. It's the portrait of a year in the life of a thirteen year old boy growing up in a small English village in the early 80s. Narrator Jason Taylor has deal with the usual teenage issues: school bullies, girl crushes, and family trouble. The book is at least semi-autobiographical: like Mitchell, the main character stutters and secretly publishes poetry in the parish newspaper under a psuedonym.

If Cloud Atlas is the three disc concept album with a gatefold painting by Roger Dean, Black Swan Green is the solo acoustic album. It's smaller, less dazzling. But it's funny and it's moving and there's a warmth and humanity to it that I loved. It reminded me a lot of Iain Banks's The Crow Road. If you're a fan of Banks, chances are good you'd enjoy Mitchell too.

Official website for Black Swan Green

Next book off the reading pile: William Gibson's Zero History.