Three books in and it’s official: I’m in love with Ali Smith. If you’d told me two years ago that I would love books written in a stream of consciousness style I’d have laughed in your face. I didn’t think it would work for me, and I can totally see why it doesn’t work for some others, but oh my, work it does!!
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When I’m reading a book by Ali Smith I feel like a little bumblebee, the pages are my nectar and I’m bumbling from page to page, getting a wee bit intoxicated on all that sweet pollen-y goodness, sometimes I might get confused and hit a window (honestly I’ve lost track of this metaphor) but I’ll always come back in the end, addicted and ready for more! I find stream of consciousness so fun and quite easy to read actually, I get completely lost in the narrator’s thoughts and don’t even notice I’m turning the pages!
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I realise now I’ve just talked about bees and not actually said anything about the book. Well it’s sort of 5 vignettes from 5 different perspectives of women whose lives all intersected in some minuscule way because of a hotel. I found it so fascinating how the tiniest, seemingly insignificant threads of our lives can edge into the lives of others... She has this creepy knack of totally nailing the minutiae of day-to-day life, I love it when a book makes me relate to the characters!
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Hotel World was well on track to becoming one of my fave reads of the year, but apparently there’s a limit to my love of stream of consciousness and that limit was chapter 5: a 30 page chapter that’s one whole sentence. Don’t get me wrong, I still couldn’t tear my eyes away and it was a wonderful way of expressing the character’s grief, but I thought the other chapters were far better executed.
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Now please excuse me while I go search for Smith’s entire bibliography.