Every reader goes through phases with their selection habits. Last year, for example, I wanted as little to do with the modern world as possible, for reasons I'm sure you can understand. I didn't want to read anything set in the last decade and I certainly didn't feel like reading any dystopian novels written to reflect an ominous future. I wanted out of these times and, for about nine months, out of this place as well. Escapism. Nostalgia. My fiction intake was a pretty steady diet of P.G. Wodehouse, Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh, Vita Sackville-West and Anthony Powell. I wanted to read about British people from the last century and their very British problems that were sometimes funny, but often just sad enough.
But by the new year I was looking for something else. I wasn't sure what. I knew I was watching a lot of neo-noir films from the 1980s and liked that particular vibe. I wanted something gritty but fun.
