What do you think?

Saturday, September 3, 2011

Been a busy summer...

Well, its been a while since my last installment. Since then I have read the following:
The Help by Kathryn Stockett, Dewey the Library Cat by Vicki Myron & Bret Witter, Life Among the Lutherans by Garrison Keillor, The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller, an Historical Atlas of the Vikings by John Haywood and Mexico by James A. Michener, all of which are fine books. My favorite was of course the Michener novel, but The Help was a close second. Keillor was charming and funny. The Viking atlas was informative. Dewey was written for a young (elementary school) audience, but if you love cats you can't help but love this book. Bridges was passable. It's one of those sappy, romance, artsy kind of novels that middle aged women swoon over. I don't swoon over anything, least of all this novel. My husband bought it at a souvenir shop in Winterset, Iowa. We were on our way to see John Wayne's birthplace and decided to stop and see the Roseman Bridge and well, we saw the bridge so we had to buy the book to see what all the fuss was about. Biggest surprise to me was that it is pure fiction. I thought they made a movie out of it because it was a true story. It's not, and now that I've read the book, I'm not interested in the film, even though Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood are outstanding actors. Mexico was excellent, but I grew a little weary of the violence and gore of bullfighting. I guess Michener thought it was necessary for understanding Mexican history. The novel was written/published late in Michener's career in 1992, just five years before his death. My current read is Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen. It was a gift, so I have to read it. I'm not liking it. It's depressing. It's almost as if Gruen wrote the screen play before the novel because it has all the elements of a second rate film: profanity, sex, violence, cruelty and abuse of people and animals. If you like reading about human beings at their worst, read this book. Alas, I'm just 20 pages short of having read half the book, but I hope it gets better soon. I was thinking about the book this afternoon and I wondered: just what does it mean to be a New York Times Bestseller ? Just because something sells doesn't mean it's good. After all, lots of people spend lots of money on things that have no useful purpose or redeeming value. So what is the criteria? I don't read the NYT, so I don't know why they need to endorse or recommend books. I've read enough books to recognize good fiction when I read it and, so far, this one doesn't even rank in the top 50%.

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