Tag Archives: book log

Book Log – A Long Way Down

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A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby

A book about four people who are thinking of killing themselves by jumping off a roof didn’t really strike my fancy.

But, Nick Hornby has a limited oeuvre just now… 5 novels (one of them young adult), some non-fiction focused on English Football1 and music, and of course the delightful Believer articles on reading. So, sooner or later, I’m was going to have to give A Long Way Down a try, since it seemed unlikely that he was going to go off rambling about football or music too much in it.

The book popped up as available on PaperbackSwap.com, so I dropped a credit on it. As a bonus, whoever had it last left a hand drawn index-card-as-bookmark in it. So it had that going for it.

If High Fidelity, About a Boy, and How To Be Good tie for first place, then A Long Way Down comes in a not very distant and very readable second. But I think it only keeps from being a distant second by the presence of one of the four main characters, Jess, the crazy teenage girl; She’s got enough Quirk to her to keep the story going and interesting. The other characters are fine, but would probably fall flat without Jess stirring things up.

Then again, that’s not unreasonable considering they’re all suicidal.

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1 I tried to read Fever Pitch. I really did. But it defeated me.

Book Log – Lady Susan

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Lady Susan by Jane Austen

This short novel is told almost entirely in letters to and from the various characters. It’s an amusing read about a conniving woman trying to attach herself to a respectable family in spite of the reputation that precedes her.

The disappointment is that Austen uses the letter convention all the way until the end, when she just sort of gives up and tells us how it all pans out. I have no idea why that couldn’t have been done in a letter. Possibly Jane just got tired, or was late for afternoon tea.

Book Log – The Best American Comics 2007

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The Best American Comics 2007 Edited by Chris Ware, Series Edited by Anne Elizabeth Moore.

Eh. There were a few gems in this collection, but one of them was excerpts from Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, which I’d already read.

Forgive me, Chicago, but I just can’t get into Lynda Barry’s Ernie Pook’s Comeek. I tried to like it when I read it in The Reader. I saw a documentary on her and liked Ms. Barry as a person. But the comic makes my head ache to look at.

I guess I’m not cool enough to be an alterna-comic aficionado.

All of which will not stop me from trying to get a hold of 2006 and 2008, because the thing with these series is you can’t judge them by one year.

Book Log – Persuasion

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Persuasion by Jane Austen

I read this a while back, but noticed that I didn’t blog about it.

I can’t for the life of me remember much about it, except that it had a character named Wentworth. And someone was persuading someone else.

Okay, a brief skimming reminds me that this is the tale of Anne Elliot, and this crazy friend who was after her brother, and trying to push her brother on Anne. I remember they were kind of amusing.

That’s all I got.

Book Log – Mansfield Park

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Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

It was only during this book, the fourth Jane Austen I’ve read this year, that steakums happened to mention that she liked Austen as well. Honestly, couples never talk anymore.

Mansfield Park is odd in that the reservedness of the time period grates a bit. I mean, going on and on of the evils of putting on a play in one’s house, with our protagonists, Edward and Fanny (of all names), as the main detractors of amateur theatricals? Really, how am I to relate to that?

It’s not like the idle rich have anything else to do.

Really, you side with the protagonists merely because everyone else is so much less worthwhile.

Emma and Clueless are next up on our Netflix cue. If time allowed, we’d do a double feature night.

Book Log – Citizen Vince

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Citizen Vince by Jess Walter

I’m not clear on how this came to be on my Wish List… it made a lot of pick lists in 2005, I think.

I thought it was a fun novel, easily read and engaging. Set in 1979, it humorously chronicles the adventures of a man in the witness protection program who is trying to make sense of the presidential election as this will be his first time voting. In the meantime, his past is catching up to him. Kind of a toned down My Blue Heaven without the fish-out-of-water theme.

It just occurred to me… this book must have come from Nick Hornby’s Stuff I’ve Been Reading column from The Believer… Hornby has a quote on the back of the jacket.

Going to The Believer online, this book was published in 2005. Try the November 2005 issue… Hornby lists Over Tumbled Graves by the same author under Books Read. Flip back a couple months and bingo, Citizen Vince under Books Read, Tumbled Graves under Books Bought.

So, Hornby liked it well enough to pick up Over Tumbled Graves immediately. I’ll have to see what he said about it.

All of which reminds me I haven’t read Hornby’s A Long Way Down. Which is currently available from PaperBackSwap.com. Done and done.

ETA: Here’s what Hornby said about Graves…

“I read and loved Jess Walter’s Citizen Vince recently, so I wanted to check out one of his earlier books. Unlike Citizen Vince, Over Tumbled Graves belongs firmly within the crime genre, although it’s not formulaic– it actually plays cleverly with the serial-killer formula. I enjoyed it a lot, but on the evidence of the recent book, Walter is a writer who is heading for territory that gives him more freedom than genre fiction allows.”

Book Log – The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass

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The Subtle Knife and
The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman (Books 2 and 3 of the His Dark Materials Trilogy)

After finishing The Golden Compass (or, Northern Lights in Europe) I wanted to wait to see the film before continuing on in the books. But I heard the film was a bit unfortunate, so I never got around to seeing it. So, thus, during last week’s beach vacation, I knocked out the last two books in the trilogy.

I have to say I enjoyed the final two more than the first, which is not to knock Compass. The second two moved along better, with action and adventure and really wild things. Regardless of how good (or bad) the first film is, I would still love to see the last two adapted, because there’s a heck of a lot of exciting stuff to put on the screen.

I very much enjoyed Pullman’s inversion of Paradise Lost, not because of any antipathy to the Christian religion, but because it’s always good fun to flip the convention of tradition. I would have enjoyed an inversion or re-imagining of the Greek/Norse mythology just as well (Gaiman’s American Gods, for instance, or Adams’ The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul come to mind amongst many others).

While I thought there were a moment or two of weakness in the writing quality, I think by and large Pullman’s technique is superior to other fantasy epic writers, and here I’m thinking of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, possibly even J.K. Rowling. I’m not sure I can authoritatively say why, but my best guess is effective use of Show Don’t Tell.

A few words on the title of the first book… I mentioned that I preferred The Golden Compass to Northern Lights as a title, and given the titles of the next two books, it just makes better sense. The Compass, the Knife, and the Spyglass are each plot-significant handheld objects introduced in each of their respective books, and make for a nicer “title rhythm” for the trilogy.

Oddly enough, The Golden Compass was a misunderstanding… Wikipedia entry:

Pullman earlier proposed to name the series The Golden Compasses. This term also appears in the poem Paradise Lost, where it poetically refers to the [drafting] compasses with which God shaped the world, an idea depicted in William Blake’s painting The Ancient of Days. Due to confusion with the other common meaning of compass (the navigational instrument) this phrase in the singular became the title of the American edition of Northern Lights (the book prominently features a device that one might label a “golden compass”1).

A few words on “atheist”2 themes… I had heard that the book was more anti-dogma than anti-belief, and quite honestly, I’m not sure whether this trilogy can be classified in such a way. It’s a speculative fiction novel, a huge “What if?” It’s got Angels, and God, and (a) Church… and they’re certainly the Bad Guys. But this series wouldn’t convince anyone to be a atheist, or even agnostic. It’s not an allegory; It’s just taking some existing traditional characters and turning their story on its head.

But, were I a believer, I’d have a tough time overlooking God as Bad Guy, even for the sake of a good story.

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1 And I believe actually described as such in the book.
2 Can it be an Atheist novel if God is a character?

Book Log – Avoiding Prison and Other Noble Vacation Goals: Adventures in Love and Danger

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Avoiding Prison and Other Noble Vacation Goals: Adventures in Love and Danger by Wendy Dale

I really liked this book.

One of the folks I was requesting a book from on PaperBackSwap.com had this on their posted books list, and as the title was funny, I added it to the request on a whim. It’s a first book, so my expectations weren’t very high. I was pleasantly surprised.

Ms. Dale has had an interesting third decade of life, a large swath of which involves prisons in Costa Rica. Having been the responsible eldest daughter of her eccentric family growing up, taking care of the house and putting herself through college, she reaches 25 and makes a conscious grab for some irresponsibility of youth. As it happens, she ends up taking on way more responsibility than most 25 year olds, or 45 year olds for that matter.

Her story is interesting and her writing is very witty with none of that first-time-writer unevenness (perhaps because her career has been writing jobs of various sorts). One of the author quotes on the book reads “Mix David Sedaris, Lucille Ball, and a fifth of tequila in a blender… you get Wendy Dale.” That’s roughly accurate. A better description for Atlanta locals would be “Put Hollis Gillespie in Costa Rica with somewhat less cursing… you get Wendy Dale.”

Book Log – The Stupidest Angel

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The Stupidest Angel by Christopher Moore

Moore manages to pull characters from his other books Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal, Practical Demonkeeping, The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove, and Island of the Sequined Love Nun in this silly book about a really dumb angel sent to Earth to do the annual Christmas Miracle.

All of Moore’s books fall under my category of Brain Candy. This is no exception.

It is also short. And has Zombies.

Which reminds me that I bought World War Z when I was in Omaha, NE, but I haven’t seen it since… Hmmmm…