Shh don’t tell anyone but I was browsing the books in Pound Land the other day and cast my eye on this turn of the page mystical thriller. What a pile of shite I thought to myself. I must head to a good book store and get me some literature. Previously I had read a book by Robert Seethaller about a young Austrian boy who went to work in a Tobacconists in Vienna just as the Second World War was starting.

Now that was literature I thought to myself, but when I think back as a child I used to read some really engrossing page turning thrillers. The typical novelists such as Robert Ludlum, Stephen King or James Herbert. The funny thing is that despite being a literary snob my own writing was more bog standard fiction. So I have to read work from my own style in order to improve and there I found myself staring at this page turning mystical fantasy. And of course it was only ONE POUND.

As I started to read the book I found myself quite attracted to the story line of a detective and his side kick living in an alternate reality of the eighteenth century when the fabled Isle of Atlantis actually existed. I kicked my snobby literary self out of the window and got into this fun story. It’s not exactly Ruth Oseki or Herman Hesse but by the second chapter it had already been revealed that the Atlantean Gods were indeed aliens from another planet. The mystery unfolded chapter by chapter as I found myself more engrossed in the story line.

The great thing about reading fiction is the art of writing a good story that pulls the reader along. I don’t find that so much in literature, of course a chapter ends as it should but it is not designed to pull you across so you can’t wait to start the next chapter. They are two different art forms like Die Hard or Pans Labyrinth. The latter always has more depth or allegories. And yes I do like Die Hard I had just become stuck in the literary world where my mind is engrossed and informed. There, I’ve just outed myself as a fiction writer. Sorry literature, maybe I’ll return to you later.