I like this part – encapsulates brilliantly the many times I faced the same situations (as Blue describes of her father)

“You kind of remind me of that boat.”

I looked at him. His face was about as cruel as a peanut butter sandwich with the crusts cut off (and he’d had a haircut so his Panama-hat hair didn’t slant quite so low over his forehead) but his remark still made me – well, suddenly, unable to stand him. He had likened me to a diminutive vessel manned by faceless dots of brown and yellow – poorly manned at that, because in a matter of seconds (if one took into account the oiled swell curled to strike down with vengeance), the thing was about to go under and that brown smudge on the horizon, that unwitting passing ship, wasn’t coming to rescue the dots anytime soon.

It was the cause of many of Dad’s outrages too, when people elected themselves his personal oracle of Delphi. It was the grounds for many of his university colleagues going from nameless, harmless peers to individuals he referred to as anathemas and bete noires. They’d made the mistake of abridging Dad, abbreviating Dad, putting Dad in a nutshell, watering Dad down, telling Dad How It Was (and getting it all wrong).

Can somebody explain to me why, oh why the editor did not chop off 150 pages off this book? So far none of what I’ve read is necessary. I’ve been hauling this book for months and I can’t read more than a page at a time. However I’m giving it a chance, I’m sure it must own up to the hype it made, but so it has been snobbish unnecesary babble.

A buoyant and hyper-literary debut, Marisha Pessl’s ‘Special Topics in Calamity Physics’ is a murder mystery narrated by a precocious teenage girl, the only child of a brilliant, nomadic professor and a dead mother. Each of the books chapters takes its title from a classic work of literature. I was ready to dislike this book because it verges on gimmicky, but I was bowled over by the relentlessness of the story’s pace and the freshness of Pessl’s literary voice.