another hot one!

I stayed up until 1:00M reading Beat The Reaper another absolutely original and delightfully entertaining novel... man, I am on a hot streak,after a long run of duds.  this one has all of my favorite elements... vengeful orphans, mafia badguys, a tall protagonist with a trench coat and a gun, even a shark tank.  Just OUTSTANDING!

Like True Confections, the story flows so nicely and is so unique, that you don't want to put it down, until you have finished. 

I am also reading The Brother's K which I read in my early 20's and adored. 

It is a little John Irving meets the Glass family, set in Camas, Washington a paper mill town.

I loved it a lot more when I was younger, but I am still enjoying the story a lot this time round. 

Mark picked it up for me at the library, the week my friend Dom was in town, and we laughed and laughed because I shared the book with her after I had finished it and it wound up going through our whole circle of friends as well as her mom (who comes from small town Washington) and her brother, who loved all the baseball analogies.  I think it is a remarkable writer, that can make me love a book about baseball and fishing!

Want to know what I am not enjoying?  Augsten Burroughs book about his father.  It totally sucks. 

I loved Running with scissors so much, but everything since has just be dreck. 

I want to like it but I don't. The writing is poor, the story derivative- the whole thing could have been condensed down to a one page essay, and served the reader much better.

Speaking of dreck, I am also reading James Frey's Bright shining morning  (the link is to a scathing blog review that I think is overly harsh).  The stories are quite good, but the writing is gimmicky and adolescent, it feels as if it were written by a person who has not experienced much but has a romantic idea of how relationships are.  I still enjoyed it.  I am not burning through it like I do when I love a book, but I will finish it and I would give it to a friend.  Not a writer friend perhaps, but  my dad, or my friend Dom, who has little patience for artists and writerly sensibilities.  I think that anyone who is still pissed at James Frey for his "memoir" is a since I could tell in the first chapter that it was a fake, (and someplace, in the archives of my parenting board, there is a thread, where I say "this is totally fake!")  silly goose and anyone with any sense should have been able to tell that too, so a lot of the negative reviews of this novel feel like sour grapes.

I am now using Rolf's fancy new computer for blogging, and the spell check is different, so if you notice my shitty spelling has excellerated in it's extreme shittiness, then you know why.