More books

I'm in the middle of reading We Need To Talk About Kevin, and I'm wondering if it shouldn't be classed as horror for prospective parents. Either that or a perfect cure for anyone (like me) getting occasional pangs of broodiness from all my friends' new children.

It's a great book, but I keep finding myself almost mentioning it to heavily pregnant acquaintances of mine, and then realising that's probably not too good for their psyches.

I know there's a twist of some sort, and I'm in that wierd state where part of me wants to flick to the end to find out how awful it gets, and the rest of me is shying away and trying to elongate the experience.

The trouble with that, of course, is that you start trying to second guess what the ending will be. As with any epistolary novel where you only have one side's letters, various questions are provoked.

Is the narrator's ex-husband responding to these letters, or even still alive? Is the narrator herself much more unreliable than we expect - is there going to be some terrible reveal later on: hardly expect her to be the one passing her son his rifle, but who knows?

And there's also a slight dissonance when she recounts their moving in to their new house, or other shared events - how much of this is needed, versus how much is explication for the reader?

Then again, many diaries are written with at least one eye on publication, so it's not fatal to the illusion.

Besides, at times it's very funny: her account of her hypothetical sitar-playing occasional Buddhist lover, constructed out of cliches that feel freshly minted, the narrator's opinion of Montessori schools, and the discussion of the hierarchy of school killers are all very coolly done, but with fantastic barbs.

Occasionally it feels intentionally hard to read, but it's made me give up on Chatter and Tim Harford this week.

Ran 6 miles in 49 minutes, 20 seconds today. 16 tomorrow, and then it's tapering down for Tromso. Strangely quite nervous about the Midnight Sun Marathon this year, and I'm not sure if this is more so than last year or not; in a way, it's much harder than at this point last year, or before Vancouver, because in both cases I hadn't run a marathon six weeks previously. Since I seem to be pushing quite hard on pace at the moment, I don't know if I'm ready for burn-out or not. Let's make it clear now: I have to get round in under four hours, I'll be disappointed if I don't get close to 3:30, and I'll be livid if I fail to beat my time from last year. But heaven knows, these may be unrealistic goals. Should I think of Vancouver being a triumph for the year and be happy with that? Somehow I can't yet: I think at the back of my mind Tromso feels tougher to me, just because it's so much more something that you have to reach into yourself for: even when the whole town comes out to cheer you on, it's not like the crowds in Vancouver.

Also, there's going to be nobody to meet me at the finish line. I think that could be really hard. Sponsorship details going up next week - debating between lupus (claimed one aunt, got a friend who's had it bad for the last six years or so), cancer, or ME - read a really affecting account at u-can-help-me.com the other day, by the wife of a guy I used to know back when I was doing long distance enduro races in 2001 and 2002.