I don’t read Word magazine that frequently, but the latest issue contains a brief article on Michael Chabon, an author who I have a lot of time for (his book The Adventures of Kavalier and Klay won the Pulitzer, and deservedly so; it was very well written indeed), and I found myself smiling and almost wanting to punch the air and shout ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ as I read the following assessment of Chabon and some of his fellow american writers.

For me, Andrew Harrison absolutely nails it when he says:
“What used to be dismissed as middlebrow – the adventure novel by the ‘real’ writer, the sci-fi story that wants to win the Booker – is unquestionably becoming the man event in new fiction. Next to it our British fiction staples, all rocky middle-class marriages or west London novelists wrestling with their writer’s blocks, look meek and unambitious.”

I’ve been promising myself for a while that I’ll post something about writing, and my increasingly-strongly held opinions about that subject, but I think we all know that means a lengthy and meandering post. So, in the meantime, please let the short quote above act as a short taste of things to come, and one which made me feel, to paraphrase the comment attributed to C.S.Lewis in Shadowlands, that I was not alone.