Pure Magic

Reading is magic.  Books are pure magic.

When I read I often wonder how it is that I would waste any minute of any day doing anything else.  When I am browsing in a bookstore I find it amazing that all those words on all those pages come together to create worlds and people and life.  It is all so simple, and so beautiful.  There are millions of books, all someone's soul put out there to hopefully effect another soul.  Some wildly successful, and some quietly ignored, and generally that is never based on merit.  It is all so brave, and so admirable.

Just sayin'.

Award Winning

There are a lot of awards for books.  People seem to like the idea of slapping a golden foil sticker on a cover and thus marking it as better than its peers.  Kind of like when, as a child, you cleaned your room or ate your carrots. Some awards I trust: I will pick up the golden foiled P of a Michael Printz award winning book and know that it is smart YA.  The Man Booker prize winners, whose books are emblazoned not with a sticker but with a rather modern looking printed circle claiming the fame, are usually good, maybe because they announce a "short list" first and then the winner, so it feels more like Miss America than the Kentucky Derby.

Then there is the Pulitzer prize: Now this prize is given in many categories, kind of like your local newspaper when it it hands out awards for Best Burger, Best Bookstore, and in the case of Eugene, Best Roller Girl (she is called Bullet Brains if you were wondering).  The Pulitzer is a widely admired prize and again we have finalists and then winners which only seems to lead to a lot of discussion of why someone other than the winner should have won, but I digress.  I have a lot of admiration for many of the past Pulitzer Fiction winners: The Road was a wrenching read but ultimately transportive, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay goes down in my top five favorites of all time! And any list that includes To Kill A Mockingbird has to be considered brilliant.

So why is it that I wish A Visit from the Goon Squad hadn't won this year? Well it isn't for the same reason that everyone else can't seem to stop talking about, it isn't that I think Freedom should have won, for me it is because all these prizes make me expect too much.

23.  A Visit from the Goon Squad

*Didn't take long for them to slap a sticker on that one did it?

We give out prizes for anything and everything these days but that doesn't change the fact that if something has "won" you expect more from it somehow.  And the fact is that reading is subjective.  Its success as a story depends on the many variables of the reader, and so while I think this was a good book, and well written, I do think that with its shifts in point of view and time it takes a certain type of reading to make it really work.  Specifically time and quiet; and wouldn't it be lovely to be on the board of these awards and have it be your job to concentrate solely on reading and evaluating book? But for me, the common reader, it is my job to make sure my 2 1/2 year old doesn't harm himself while I flip a few pages when I can.

Vacation Vortex

What the hell just happened?

Darren and I went to Boulder, Colorado to visit my parents last week and I swear I have no idea where the time went, but I certainly didn't spend much of it reading.  I used to go to my parents and read, watch movies, eat, walk; but now I have a 2 1/2 year old, so I never read, or watch movies. When we eat it feels more like shoveling, and when we walk it is more like meandering.  It is certainly still wonderful to be there but it is different and a bit sad to think that it may never be the same.

However, at the outset of the trip I started reading Visit from the Goon Squad, and since then it has won the 2011 Pulitzer for fiction, so that bodes well for me enjoying it's remaining pages.  So far, I really like it but with it's shifts in time and points of view it would be a much better idea to give it more attention than I have.

What Might Have Been

22.  Will Grayson, Will Grayson

I could have loved you Will Grayson, either of you, but I felt like I never really got to know you.  And I guess the point was that neither of you felt that you really even knew yourselves so how can I expect to know more than you?  Well, because you are characters and I was trying to learn more.  Ultimately, the back and forth of authorship was your downfall.  Trying to make two stories into one story is hard, this is so true in life as well.  Each person is worthy of their own story yet we strive to link our stories with other peoples.  Maybe that is the truth of it; it isn't the book's fault that each character's story felt incomplete, no one's story is complete and I need to stop having the expectation.

**I know I had more to say on this one, but after being on vacation I can't remember a thing!

We Interupt Your Reading...

for all sorts of crap lately!  I was all stoked about this book, and suddenly real life seems to think that I shouldn't be able to read for longer than 5 minutes.  I hate this, and what I hate even more is that this book fell apart and left me less than thrilled.  Part of its failure could have been my fractured reading, but blaming it solely on that would be less than honest.

21. Boneshaker

So this book started out great.  The set up to the main action had good characters, a cool back story with just the right hint of intrigue, and a steampunk version of Seattle with pirates, zombies, and a mad inventor.  All good right?  Not so much.

In this version of history, which is only different because we are told not really shown, has a portion of Seattle sealed off due to poisonous gas that either kills you or turns you into a "rotter".  Even without being told I would assume this is a place to avoid, but our heros have to go there so that makes sense, but the people who live there willingly make zero sense and at no point is that addressed.  Why the hell are they there?  Don't know, never will...

Shifting points of view is trendy, it is the thing, I get it; but it needs to be done with skill, not just because you need to have someone else doing something to make a story.  What was particularly annoying was the fact that the two story lines start out during different times, and you never know if that changes and thus you don't know how some of the action is flowing.

Then we have the ending.  Yuck.

Here is the thing, if you write a book, take some time with it, develop the plot and characters beyond what you plan to publish, have friends and strangers read it and ask questions.  Stop trying to write the next successful movie franchise. This book had a lot of potentially successful elements that were left to languish and that is too bad.