no nonsense november
November's theme, on BookTube and the like, is Non-Fiction. Non-Fiction November. It's got a nice ring to it. However, I always have a non-fiction book on the go (currently Wintering by Katherine May) so I decided to stay alliterative but go off piste and, indeed, go 'no nonsense' by reading two of the biggest books on my shelves. I'll admit that I do suffer a bit from Big Book Fear (it's a real thing) so these books represent a real challenge for me. The two big beasts in question are; Ducks, Newburyport (2019) by Lucy Ellmann, and The Count of Monte Cristo (1846) by Alexandre Dumas. These are real chunky tomes. Ducks is 987 pages long, Cristo is 872. And they couldn't be more different in style. Ducks is set in C21st America, its style is ultra modern stream-of-consciousness, and its USP is that it's written in one, very long, sentence (in reality it's about 8 sentences) but the author frequently uses the phrase 'The fact that..' where o