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As Meat Loves Salt from Amazon as I am reliably informed it is rich in teh gay. Anyone read it? Opinions? It gets glowing reviews.
And it's Sunday! Aka do nothing day. Toasty buttered toast, coffee, Countryfile, an exciting looking new book to review, all day to browse t'internet and post endlessly meaningless, skatageous dribblings. My quiet joy is quiet and joyous.
Oh, and Happy Mother's Day to all that fit the category. I hope you're having a simply marvellous day you little furry balls of love and nonsense, you. XXX
And it's Sunday! Aka do nothing day. Toasty buttered toast, coffee, Countryfile, an exciting looking new book to review, all day to browse t'internet and post endlessly meaningless, skatageous dribblings. My quiet joy is quiet and joyous.
Oh, and Happy Mother's Day to all that fit the category. I hope you're having a simply marvellous day you little furry balls of love and nonsense, you. XXX
happy
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I *hated* that book, which I don't do very often. There are lots of things I don't like, but this - it's got a plot & character arcs that revolve around self-loathing, but it's by and large readable until about two-thirds of the way in, when it wanders down this weird tangent and becomes utterly foul. These are personal responses, mind you; the writer may very well have had a completely different book in mind but the book I read was fueled by a lot of internalized homophobia, and I reacted badly, I think, because she didn't seem to be aware of it in the text.
If you do end up reading it, I'd be very interested to hear what you thought. I know it was well-reviewed, but I actually threw it away when I was done with it. I kept wanting it to be a different book, you know?
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I understand because I had exactly the same reaction to The Time Traveller's Wife which I got because so many praised it but I couldn't even finish it; I thought it was one of the stupedest, most hateful things it's ever been my misfortune to attempt to read.
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The other book that everybody *loved* and I couldn't finish was The Lovely Bones, which I thought should have been a short story in the New Yorker. The high concept bit at the beginning was beautifully done, and a great fresh take on creepy; the last two thirds, where it wanders around watching her family collapse, was just tedious. The original idea was justt that, I think: an idea, not a story.
(A friend of mine said about the movie The English Patient that he enjoyed the first two hours but the last six really wore him out. I feel that way about so many things these days, that the concept is good but it's just a concept...)
but the last six really wore him out.
I just had to read a book for Amazon in very similar vein, so consciously 'important' but with no plot and no characters I care deeply about - so amorphous it's hard to review because there's really nothing there to talk about.
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It is.
Opinions/
It pushes all my buttons, mainly by being set in an interesting time that isn't this one and by having the most unreliable narrator of all time (because he doesn't actually know, for a long time, what he's done in his own past; in fact it's possible he never knows or tells all of it). Incidentally I think the internalised homophobia someone in this thread speaks of is there, but it is the narrator's not the writer's - Jacob does, after all, live in an age when what he wants and does is held to be sinful, and being a believer the only way he can get around that is to deny it to the extent that quite often he consigns it to a part of his mind and memory he isn't even conscious of. And certainly the writer, who isn't remotely like Jacob, knows exactly what she's doing with him and his complicated thought processes (I can vouch for that cos I was there when she was writing it). It was a hell of a page-turner for me.
Excellent!