A bookworm journalist blogs on literature and life
Review: The Magician King was a fucking awesome book.
Honestly, that’s all I really want to say about it… but of course that’s not a real review. But that is the gushing, giddy, and inarticulate assessment that I gave to the boyfriend when he asked what I thought of the book the moment after I finished reading it on our Thanksgiving road trip.
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Review: A marriage plot is a particular kind of English novel , written by the likes of Jane Austen and George Eliot, where the central conflict of the book centers around whether or not the heroine will end up married. Those are the kinds of stories that fascinate Madeline, the central heroine of Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, and are the topic of her senior thesis. However, during the early 1980s, those kinds of stories just aren’t en vogue anymore, instead being replaced by deconstruction and the growing field of semiotics.
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One Sentence Summary: A young pharmaceutical scientist heads into the heart of darkness that is the Amazonian rain forest to find her lost coworker and confront a scientist on the loose.
One Sentence Review: Anne Patchett’s beautiful writing alone is enough reason to read this book.
Why I Read It: I have a special place in my heart of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, so hearing this one compared to it was enough to make me want to read it.
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Earlier this month I made a tentative plan to spend the rest of the year trying to read books I already have — review copies or bought copies — and limit books from the library to try and make a dent on the piles and piles of books that are starting to weigh on me.
Of course, I wasn’t going to pull myself off the lists of holds I’m on at the library, which foiled my plans: Both The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides and The Magician King by Lev Grossman arrived for me on Tuesday. Curses, effective library system! (I kid, I kid!).
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Perrotta never makes even a passing reference to September 11 in The Leftovers, and yet that event is all I could think about as I read. I think what Perrotta does is capture the feeling of what September 11 was — an inexplicable event that, in a single instant, changed the world as we knew it — and explores it without ever given that event a name. Rather than focusing so as explicitly on the facts of the event like the first pages of The Submission does, Perrotta writes about loss and our individual response to events that we cannot explain. It’s exactly the sort of book I’ve wanted to read about September 11, even if Perotta never says that.
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I grabbed this book at BEA because I have a bit of an author crush on Bill Willingham and his Fables series of graphic novels. I don’t read a lot of middle grade/young adult fiction, but the idea of Down the Mysterly River reminded of a lot of what Willingham does in Fables — play around with stories we think we know and finding ways to explore them in new ways.
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It’s been a weird week around here. I got a strange cold/fever thing on Monday which kicked my butt for most of the week. I still had to do everything I’m supposed to do at the newspaper, which left me with no physical or mental energy outside of work to do much except watch television and do a little reading. Getting an extra hour of sleep today was amazing.
I must be on the mend, however, because I managed to finish two books this weekend — The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton and Sugar in My Bowl: Real Women Write about Real Sex by Erica Jong.
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Have you ever read a review of a book that sticks with you so fully that even two years later you can still remember the title of the book and what part of the review made you want to read the book?
That’s what happened with Jonathan Carroll’s book The Ghost in Love, which first got on my radar almost exactly two years ago when a college friend, Ben, who has great tasted in all sorts of books posted a glowingly crazy-sounding review of the book.
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When I was walking around Book Expo American on the first day last year, a publicist with Little Brown got my attention and asked if I wanted a copy of The Art of Fielding, a book she said they were heavily promoting at the show. I asked what it was about, and when she replied “Baseball,” I must have made some sort of face because she immediately added something to the effect of, “But it’s not really about baseball!”
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One Sentence Summary: A devout clerk for a Dutch trading company goes to find his fortune in Japan so he can marry his wealthy fiancee, but has his plans thrown off course after a random meeting with young midwife-in-training.
One Sentence Review: The first part of this book was terribly boring, but things picked up about 175 pages in.
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