this was lea’s choice for me to read for this year’s xmas book trade (i’m having her read stephenson’s diamond age). i was never required to read this for school (as were many), which is a good thing, since i doubt i would have enjoyed it in high school. going to see the movie halfway through only picked up my reading pace.
coetzee, as always, writes a book short and full, elegant and complex, potent and poignant.
i’m not really sure how i feel about the way murakami explicitly lays out at the end all the existential questions this book implicitly raises throughout its course. still, a fun and interesting read.
this is a fun and quick read. i remember having a good time playing around with the statistics package we had to use for an intro to sociology class, and coming up with some odd correlations. this is like that, but more lucid.
i like eggers’ stuff. short stories tend to be hit-or-miss, and this collection is no exception to that rule of thumb, but there are plenty enough hits to make it worthwhile. eggers is good at melding humor and sorrow, and many of these stories showcase that talent.
vampires are a rich topic for thrillers. this book is decent, though it transitions from build-up to finished so quickly that it leaves you wondering what just happened.
this book reminds me of hornsby’s high fidelity, in that both are (a) good books, which were (b) excellently adapted into movies. not much, if anything, is lost in the transition from book to movie, so if you’ve seen the movie, you wouldn’t really “need” to read the book. this is not to say that it’s not a good book; i’m just saying that this wasn’t a case where an excellent book was chopped up to make a merely-good movie. the book has a very different feel to it; it is smarter and more grounded in reality, where as the movie is flashier and more cartoony at the same time as it is grittier. but, to repeat: both are good.
is it fair to approach a book like this, discussing it only as it relates to a movie which it spawned? perhaps not, but that’s how i went into it.
also, i should point out how surprised i am that i have read four books in one week.
the controversy surrounding this book only makes it more fun to read.
these white-with-colored-stripes editions of salinger works are perfect for reading on an airplane, then giving to someone else to read as well. sadly, i didn’t quite manage to pass this off to anyone.
here is another of the handful of books lea got me for my birthday. i don’t claim to know much of anything about the korean war, but this book offers a fascinating insight into both that conflict, and to the recently communized (communist-ized?) chinese culture of the time.