Book Reports
Jul. 9th, 2011 12:45 amStop whatever you're doing and go find a copy of John Connolly's The Book of Lost Things. It's part Narnia, part Alice in Wonderland, a bit Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, and entirely awesome. Plus it's filled with creepy-ass subversions of fairy tales that will make you shiver with delight. The story itself, aided by the densely descriptive prose, has such a cinematic feel that I'm shocked it hasn't been turned into a movie yet. (Wikipedia informs me that one is in development, but has been so for four years now...hmmm.) My only criticism is that the ending felt the tiniest bit pat, but the rest of the book was so good that I don't even care. Read it. Now. Really.
Slightly less urgent but still worthwhile is Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi. This was hugely popular when it came out earlier this decade, and now I see why. It's hard to describe exactly what's so wonderful about it--maybe I could just say that Nafisi synthesizes her obvious love of literature, teaching, and history, as well as parts of the western canon and of Iranian culture and politics, into something remarkable--but English majors, y'all need to read this.
On the other hand, something immensely popular to run away from is Paul Coelho's The Alchemist. I probably should've been tipped off by the subtitle ("A Fable About Following Your Dreams"), but sadly, I was not. This is a New Agey self-help book poorly disguised as a novel. The characters are stand-ins for ideas, the dialogue is largely made up of long speeches that could have come from some kind of wacky spiritual treatise, and much of what they were saying to each other made me want to beat my head against a wall. However, I did finish the book, for two reasons: it's short, so what did I have to lose but an hour or two, and Coelho's (or more accurately Coelho's and his translator's) language is lovely. He did great things with all the settings. Now if only there had been real characters to move among them.
Finally, something I'm not exactly recommending because I imagine most of you have read it before, but I finally got around to reading Anne of Green Gables last week, only about twenty years late. I'm not quite sure how I missed it as a child, and it's unfortunate that I did, because I would've loved it as a nine-year-old or so.* It is a bit too much of a children's novel to enjoy as wholeheartedly now as I would have then, but I did find Anne and everyone else in it extremely charming. Not quite charming enough to read the rest of the books in the series, but nevertheless.
* Though my favorite fictional redhead would still have to be Pippi Longstocking. Oh, how I wanted to be Annika and have Pippi as a friend when I was seven. Heh, I think even then I knew she was just too exciting to actually want to be.
*
And in completely unrelated news, an entertaining TV production video: "What it takes to walk down a hallway on Burn Notice." No spoilers.
Slightly less urgent but still worthwhile is Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi. This was hugely popular when it came out earlier this decade, and now I see why. It's hard to describe exactly what's so wonderful about it--maybe I could just say that Nafisi synthesizes her obvious love of literature, teaching, and history, as well as parts of the western canon and of Iranian culture and politics, into something remarkable--but English majors, y'all need to read this.
On the other hand, something immensely popular to run away from is Paul Coelho's The Alchemist. I probably should've been tipped off by the subtitle ("A Fable About Following Your Dreams"), but sadly, I was not. This is a New Agey self-help book poorly disguised as a novel. The characters are stand-ins for ideas, the dialogue is largely made up of long speeches that could have come from some kind of wacky spiritual treatise, and much of what they were saying to each other made me want to beat my head against a wall. However, I did finish the book, for two reasons: it's short, so what did I have to lose but an hour or two, and Coelho's (or more accurately Coelho's and his translator's) language is lovely. He did great things with all the settings. Now if only there had been real characters to move among them.
Finally, something I'm not exactly recommending because I imagine most of you have read it before, but I finally got around to reading Anne of Green Gables last week, only about twenty years late. I'm not quite sure how I missed it as a child, and it's unfortunate that I did, because I would've loved it as a nine-year-old or so.* It is a bit too much of a children's novel to enjoy as wholeheartedly now as I would have then, but I did find Anne and everyone else in it extremely charming. Not quite charming enough to read the rest of the books in the series, but nevertheless.
* Though my favorite fictional redhead would still have to be Pippi Longstocking. Oh, how I wanted to be Annika and have Pippi as a friend when I was seven. Heh, I think even then I knew she was just too exciting to actually want to be.
*
And in completely unrelated news, an entertaining TV production video: "What it takes to walk down a hallway on Burn Notice." No spoilers.
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