Time's Arrow - Martin Amis

Big spoilers. I strongly recommend not reading this entry if you haven't read the book.

Very disorientating. When people said it's backwards, I expected something like Memento, not backwards backwards. I wish I hadn't known anything about it; the Nazi war criminal stuff would have been a shocking twist. In a way it seems essentially gimmicky; it is too short to tell the life story it tells in any depth, so the only thing that gives it any power is that it's backwards, an so very novel. And the subject matter, of course. Anyway it's a good book. I just feel I've missed out on a six-hundred-page Dickens-style epic told backwards in amazing detail.

The Memoirs of a Survivor - Doris Lessing

Had some disagreement with the girlfriend about this one. I thought the writing style was far too dense and too intellectual - intellectual in a show-offy way - for it to make an entertaining read. She says that's not what it's supposed to be. Anyway it was just about worth the effort, mainly for the setting, which is not so much post-apocalyptic as mid-apocalyptic, and fascinating. It seems, ultimately, to be a book in which the young take over civilisation from the old. It's about the transition from our current, unsustainable way of life to something more down to earth.