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October 09, 2008
Books I Read in the Last Six Months
New Total: 147
The Tea-House Fire by Ellis Avery
I’ve read my fair share of fiction-set-in-Japan (and China for that matter), and this was another one. Not good, not bad. Reviews seem to think it is “a magisterial novel that is equal parts love story, imaginative history and bildungsroman, a story as alluring as it is powerful”. Eh, I guess.
The Raw Shark Texts: A Novel by Steven Hall
In the works of Amazon.com, this book is “a twisting, trippy thriller that tears through the landscape of language, revealing the lurking terrors uncovered in every letter of the written word. Steven Hall swims in the same surreal waters as pop-culture pioneers David Lynch and Michel Gondry, and The Raw Shark Texts deserves to be shelved somewhere between Trainspotting and Life of Pi. It pulls you under like a riptide, leaving you exhausted, exhilarated, and gasping for air.” I stayed up until almost dawn, turning the pages well after my eyes ached with exhaustion. Bizarre and fabulous.
The Know-It-All” One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World by A. J. Jacobs
A memoir of the year A.J. Jacobs spent reading all 32 volumes of the 2002, the Know-It-All is by turns a random dabbling of historical facts and a look at what reading 44 million words can do to a couple. While I think its supposed to be charming and eccentric, I found the author more than a little annoying. I certainly hope he was exaggerating for the purposes of the book—otherwise it should be titled One Man’s Quest to Become the Most Obnoxious Person in the World. And that’s saying something as I’ve dated at least one contender for that title.
Run: A Novel by Ann Patchett
I adore Patchett’s earlier novel Bel Canto, and was delighted to read her latest, an “intimate domestic drama that nonetheless deals with big issues touching us all: religion, race, class, politics and, above all else, family.” There is something about her writing that is totally engrossing – other reviewers have likened it to a great television show (like Six Feet Under) in its character complexity. It’s rare that I can read in an airplane – I usually end up distracted or napping – but this was a book where I was happy to squeeze in a few more pages while everyone else disembarked the aircraft. Simply lovely.
The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
Why do I keep reading British-Indian lit? I never enjoy it, and then I feel like a bad person. This novel got lots of acclaim as a “briskly paced and sumptuously written, the novel ponders questions of nationhood, modernity, and class, in ways both moving and revelatory,” but I have to disagree. While it was a gazillion times better than Brick Lane (which was admittedly British-Bengali), I got to the end only to say I made it through. The most notable piece of the book is where I was assaulted by a strange guy while reading Chapter 5 out in front of my apartment building. Fortunately, I was already so irritated by the book that I lost no time in threatening to call the police if he didn’t stop stroking my arm. And thus ends my attempts to enjoy the genre.
