The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
I'd had this book out for ages and kept meaning to read it, but it wasn't until last week that I finally picked it up one night when I couldn't sleep. I had a weird mix of expectations for it - part of me was not really expecting to like it due to my extreme disinterest in comic books, but it was hyped up by enough people that I was expecting it to overcome the whole comic book factor.
It did. It was a great book, full of interesting characters and well-spun plot concepts that overlapped and interwove and were generally just complex enough. Joe was just tragic enough without crossing the invisible line into ridiculously miserable, and Sammy's struggles with his identity were subtle enough not to be irritating. It was a book that could have easily gotten very annoying, very quickly, and it avoided a lot of pitfalls and easy answers that would have made it predictable and cutesy.
But the ending just didn't live up to the rest of the book. It wasn't exciting enough, didn't have enough of that superhero flair that it felt like the characters deserved. It left me feeling kind of disappointed, simply because a book like that feels like it needs a bit of a razmatazz ending so you feel like it was ok that the book ended, because it ended so well. This one just kind of...ended. And I know that was the point, but I couldn't help but be kind of disappointed.
Overall, though, the book was great, and I'm a lot more interested in comic books than I was before I read it. Not to say that I'm going to start reading them with any sort of enthusiasm (sorry, Dev), but I can understand the appeal a lot more than before I read this book.
Except Archie. I just do not get Archie. And this is coming from someone who read a billion of them as a kid. What the hell is the appeal of those stupid things? They're so BAD! They're nothing but recycled sexist stories from the 1950s! Boo to Archie!
There and Back Again: An Actor's Tale
I requested this book when I was in a particularly nerdy Lord of the Rings mood, because I wanted to get some of the behind the scenes peeks from the movies, and I figured I'd wade through Sean Astin's writing to get them. Having listened to the cast commentaries for two of the LOTR movies, I had a sneaking suspicion that I was going to find him incredibly tedious, although not as bad as John Rhys-Davies, whose commentary was just awful. But I figured I should give the guy a chance. And it's not like I went out and bought his book. The delightful thing about the library is not having to feel like you need your money's worth out of a book.
Well. I was not wrong. Sean Astin is a totally pretentious guy who thinks he's pretty damn fabulous. The book was mostly him pontificating on his own personal hangups (of which there are many), peppered with occasional references to how other members of the cast felt about the Fabulous Sean. He seems to be totally shocked that every single member of the entire production did not hang on his every word.
In the interests of full disclosure, I did get some perverse glee out of the stories of him being snubbed, and the part of my brain that cares about scandal kind of enjoyed hearing the shit-talk about a few of the cast, but overall, this book was just...boring. He's not an engaging writer, and he's not an engaging actor (I was seriously underwhelmed by Sam, I have to say), so the appeal of the book was pretty limited.
Now, if Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd got together and wrote a book,
that would be worth money. This? Was barely worth the lengthy wait on the hold list. Bleah. Stick to acting in small movies that I won't see, Sean.
Gregor the Overlander and Granny Torrelli Make Soup
I'm in charge of the Young Reader's Choice Awards at work this year, which means I will be going out to the schools and talking about the awards and the books that have been nominated for it. I'm really excited about doing this - I remember being in elementary school and reading the books for these awards (then called the PNLA awards) - I even won a prize in grade five for reading the most in my class. (I got a copy of the Last Battle, signed by my extremely beloved grade five teacher with a note about what a good reader I was.)
So I decided that although it's not required of YRCA contacts, I was going to read all of the YRCA books this year, something I always mean to do but never quite get around to. There are three categories for the awards, Junior, Intermediate, and Senior. There are 21 books total in all three categories, and I had read precisely one of them before the nominations came out. (Actually, I read it after the nominations came out, but I already had it signed out when the nominations were announced: The Time Traveler's Wife. Which my roommate read this week and also loved to death.)
Last year, I was kind of underwhelmed by the YRCA books that I read. There were a few good ones, but some of them were just plain mediocre. So I was sort of nervous about embarking on this reading project, because I didn't want the books to totally suck. There are a lot of good books out there; I didn't want to waste precious reading time on crappy ones.
Much to my delight, the first two I read were excellent.
Granny Torrelli Makes Soup is a book by Sharon Creech, who is an extremely popular children's author that I've never really gotten into. Her books are quite unusually written, often featuring extremely short chapters and unusual stylistic choice. This book, while brief, is appealing and intruiging. The story of a 12-year-old girl's uncertain feelings for an old friend are tidily brought out in a lengthy series of cooking escapades with her grandmother, and the culture of her family is presented in a refreshingly unstereotypical fashion. Rosie, the granddaughter, is cute without being cutesy, and Granny Torrelli is the kind of grandma everybody secretly wishes they had. Bailey, the object of Rosie's desires, is blind without being Blind - his disability is not ignored, nor is it harped on. It's a book that could have easily gotten into treacley without any trouble at all, but it manages to be light-hearted while still making its point. I was extremely pleasantly surprised by it.
Gregor the Overlander is a juvenile fantasy. This is always a tricky place to start with me. I am a recent convert to fantasy, and even now I rarely read adult fantasy, preferring kids' fantasy for the most part, but even then I'm picky. I don't go in for unicorn/princess/dragon stuff, for the most part, nor am I wild about extremely complicated other worlds. My type of fantasy is stuff like Harry Potter, or Alanna, by Tamora Pierce, which feature regular people doing unusual things. But I'm picky even within that concept. I hated
So You Want to be a Wizard, which has a very similar idea, and I was bored to tears by
Wizard of Earthsea, which is a little more fantastical and a little less realistic, but still. Fantasy is very touch and go.
So I was very pleased to discover that
Gregor is neither predictable nor dull. It's tricky, in fantasy, to come up with an idea that hasn't been done to death. (Let's face it. Harry Potter, while one of my personal favourites, is far from original. Fun, yes. A good use of the genre, yes. Well-written, not particularly. Totally addictive, yes. But blindingly original, no. There are a million books about regular kids becoming wizards. Or witches. Or whatever. Wizard boarding school is not earth-shattering creativity, people, it's a well-established concept that features in loads of other fantasy books.) But
Gregor is an interesting idea that starts out in our reality, which is how I like my fantasy to take place. It features an alternative universe that exists parallel to our own, and it's peopled (which is the wrong word, I suppose, since they aren't all people) with surprisingly appealing characters and moderately suspensful concepts.
The story is focused on a prophecy which Gregor, an Overlander who arrives in an Underland filled with giant bugs and rats, is destined to fulfill. Gregor is meant to be a hero, but he is understandably resistant to the idea. He doesn't become heroic in an unbelieveable blaze of glory, and his uncertainty with his destiny is far more believeable than a lot of fantasy heroes tend to be.
His little sister Boots is a bit of a show-stealer, and the creatures of the Underworld are varied and intruiging, and given a lot of layers for minor characters in a fairly short children's book. Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by this book all the way through, and wasn't even irritated with the blatant set-up for a sequel, which often annoys me.
Pleasantly surprising, both of them.
Thursday Next Series
I am currently in the throes of the fourth Thursday Next series, the books that started with
The Eyre Affair and was followed up by
Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, and
Something Rotten. I finally got around to reading
The Eyre Affair in California, and upon my return I quickly hooked up with the subsequent three. They are quick reads, and they're really hard to describe, something that seems to be the case with a lot of the stuff I'm reading lately.
These books are set in an alternative universe in which literature reigns supreme, and authors are treated with the kind of reverance that movie stars get in our world. (A very entertaining scene involves a John Milton convention, at which everyone is named John Milton having changed their names in honour of the author.) The plot revolves around a Literature Detective named Thursday Next (all the names are silly like that), and the first book focuses on the recent discovery by Thursday's uncle of a way to get inside books.
I have enjoyed the books immensely, but I'm having a hard time categorizing them in my head. Some books I think of as relatively intelligent books, some are fluff, some are funny...everything tends to get assigned an area of my head in which to swim around. But these are a weird combination of fluff, fantasy, mystery, and literary, and it's hard to get a sense of how exactly they're intended. Probably as no-man's land, which is kind of how they feel to me.
I think, thus far, the third one was my favourite, because it (without giving too much away) was set almost entirely in book world, and the jokes and situations involving literary conventions and the writing process were very nerdily enjoyable. I think that's why I'm enjoying these books - you pretty much have to be a book nerd to like them, and I enjoy it when books are written specifically with book nerds in mind. (I think it's why I enjoyed the two books about book clubs that I read.) The first book was also very enjoyable, simply because a chunk of it was set in Wales in the small town where my dad grew up, which had become the capital of the People's Republic of Wales. (Hee.)
I should finish up
Something Rotten in the next few days, and then I have to decide what to tackle next.
The Kitchen God's Wife is the next book for my book club, and since I've been an incredibly crappy book club member of late, I'm going to make a major effort to get that read sooner rather than later. I think I better just abandon all hope on the
Lions of Al-Rasan, because without the motivation of book club to read it, I'm not sure I'll ever get it read, and I have a ton of other books out from the library that I want to get reading.
I also need to go on a mass returning spree. The library books are taking over my bedroom again. Bad books. No cookie!
