I’ve just finished re-reading Dusty Answer by Rosamond Lehmann. This is one of the books that I discovered in the boxes of stuff reclaimed from my parents over the last few months. I first read it when I was about nineteen and remember really enjoying it. That’s about all I can remember though as this was just like I was reading it for the first time. Nothing even vaguely rang a bell. I do worry about my memory sometimes.

One thing that I can say with certainty is that I’m not nineteen any more. What I enjoyed then is unfortunately coming across as pretentious twaddle now. Not that I didn’t enjoy the book. It was quite compulsive reading and I did care enough to find out how it all turned out (pretty depressingly actually). However, it’s not real-world stuff. It’s about a girl who at the beginning of the book is round about eighteen and her dealings with a group of young people who on and off stayed in the house next door. I found her annoying because she lived too much in her own head and dreamt up how things should be rather than enjoying life for what it was. Probably exactly what I did at that age…

An enjoyable read but not one to read too many times. In fact it’s already gone down the road to our local second hand bookshop.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 10th, 2008 at 4:56 pm and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.