Reading While Traveling

I read a bit while I was abroad, and thought I'd mention here, by way of catching up a bit, what I ran into and what I enjoyed. So here's the list:

• One Day - David Nicholls
• Let the Great World Spin - Colum McCann
• Juliet, Naked - Nick Hornby
• Cultural Consumption and Everyday Life - John Storey

Of them, I'd recommend the first three, with strongest marks going to Let the Great World Spin (I'm sure, not surprisingly), though One Day reminded me a bit of what would happen if you mixed the drama of The Time Traveler's Wife with a Nick Hornby book, and the Nick Hornby book saw him finally returning to the other thing that made High Fidelity such a great book (not the angst of a male lead his both something of a fuck up and a success, though that's there, too): music as a center piece.

As for Storey, it's intended as a history of the idea of cultural consumption, but the history itself feels a bit light. Entire areas are set up as straw men, based on one or two citations, and dismissed in a couple of paragraphs. It made for interesting "in the shade at a conference" reading, but overall, it was a bit disappointing, I thought.

I should probably also note that I'm about 120 pages into A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book. I like it, though I do think sometimes an editor could stand to weigh in a little more.