Patrick Carey

Music, especially rock and pop music, is such a distillation of people's youth that every generation has a version of the Crystal Ballroom, whether or not it's as famous or as historically recorded.

I'd definitely pick something up like that.

Well, I was a very regular at the Abercrombie Hotel on Broadway, which no longer exists, sadly.

So even my youth is crumbling before me.

It's funny, actually, that book, Almost Like a Mirror, sounds a lot like A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, which won the Pulitzer in 2010, and which I'm currently halfway through.

It's obviously a big mine of artistic material for people, that period of people's lives.

There's something about that chopped up structure that really is reminiscent of what memory feels like.

I mean, that's my experience of

A Visit from the Goon Squad, and it sounds like it might be reflected in this novel as well.

It sort of recreates memory and its sort of choppy experience of it.

Well, I just finished one of Muriel Spark's novels.

It's called The Girls of Slender Means and I cannot recommend it enough.

It's only 110 pages.

It won't take you longer than a couple of hours but it is a knockout of a book and

because it's set just after the end of the Second World War when people's movements are still restricted, when there's rations going on, it's sort of nice to read a book that's set in an equally, though very different, strange time and watch the characters get on with their lives, as we're all doing.

Hi, Kate.

Hey, Cassie.

How are you going?

Oh, my pleasure.

I look terrible, so I'm happy not to be seen by the public.