More to remind me of what I've read more than anything...

[thegerald]

Over the last ten days or so, I've managed to finish four very delightful books.

1.) La Mollie and the King of Tears
This book not only is interesting to read, it *taught* me things, and not just of the emotional sort. I learned more about the California culture during the seventies, including the meteor that everyone thought would end the world.

Comments

[bililoquy]

Mixed feelings on The Road and on Cormac McCarthy in general--I think he's a reasonably good but vastly overrated writer whose stylistic choices contribute nothing substantive to (and therefore hinder) his usually solid stories. (Which was why No Country for Old Men was a much more successful movie than book, for me.) Another beef I had with The Road was that he seems not to have read a sci-fi novel in his life, because that story, style, and general setting have been done countless times over the last forty years, and in pretty similar ways--just not by writers viewed as "literary."

I love Jonathan Safran Foer--you should absolutely check out Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Its child narrator is one of the best I've encountered, and it's perhaps the only successful 9/11 novel I've read.

[thegerald]

I can understand the feelings on McCarthy. I haven't read anything else by him and sci-fi is not my genre of choice (which really means I've read very little of it). The idea, while it wasn't new to me, was presented in a way that I'm not familiar with. I did read that a lot of critics bash him for writing easy-to-make-movie books that are more like scripts, but I think in The Road, at least for me, the best part of the writing was in the last paragraph (describing the trout in the stream and how things used to be). I don't know where it leaves the reader and I appreciate his use of the past tense(I felt like the last paragraph's tense, while being the exact same as the rest of the book, came off as more potent to the story). It left me feeling lost, which I enjoyed, although I'm sure it's probably been used countless times and again, I'm slow to pick it up.

I actually just ordered the Foer book on Amazon--I'm exited about it!