'The chamber was filled with boiling kettles and glass rubber tubes, boilers and conveyor belts. In the centre was a bubbling brass vat.
There were no windows in the room. The light came from an enormous number of placid-looking insects the size of Deeba's fist, which sat on shelves and stools and crawled sluggishly up the walls. Their abdomens were light bulbs, screwed into their thoraxes. Their slow motion made the shadows crawl.
The room was a hubbub. Thronging ever surface were broken umbrellas. They trotted in spidery motion through turning cylinders, in front of sprays of liquid. They hauled up a ridge to the edge of the vat and, one by one, jumped in.
They darted in the liquid like penguins underwater, and emerged again, shivering, leaped out and slotted themselves into an enormous rack. Rows and rows of unbrellas dripped and dried.'
Un Lun Dun
(Pages 138-139)
If Neverwhere had a sewer baby with The Looking Glass Wars.
My mum asked me to read this.
She wasn't sure about it and so foisted it on me.
And i can understand why.
It's an awesome book...if you're eight years old.
And that is by no means a bad thing, it's just i'm too bloody old for this particular style of writing.
If i was younger i'd be all over Un Lun Dun like a wet rash but unfortunately i'm way too curmudgeonly for such whimsy.
(says the girl who reads Battlepug)
If i ever have a child though - yuck - i'll most certainly suggest they read it.
And a few hundred other children's books.
No spawn of mine will not have read Alice.
Otherwise they will be banishèd.
...
It may be wise i keep my womb empty...
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