I made the mistake of reading three books at the cottage without immediately blogging and *The Round House* was the first, so my “penetrating insights” will be somewhat dulled by the intermediary reads and days. With that said I found *The Round House* to be exceptionally good. Best I’ve read in 2013. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Bestseller
The Round House: Doing (it) Justice
Filed under American literature, Erin's Favourite Books, Fiction, Prize Winner
The Accidental: Salty
The Accidental doesn’t feature Vivian Leigh. Or Scarlett O’Hara. But it nevertheless reminded me of selfishness, of women who don’t know what they want until they can’t have it, and of the impact of single interactions.
The novel switches narrative point of view in each chapter, rotating through the cast of five family members in each of the three parts. Each point of view fully realizes its protagonist, but none perhaps as fully as in the chapters narrated by the son, Magnus. The family members are all sad, until touched by the singular arrival of Amber, who compels each of them to reconsider their lives so far, and to ask themselves what they really want out of life. That the answers are not necessarily original (life!) does not make them less compelling. Deciding to change and then actually changing… well, such bravery does not often go recognized the way it might.
I can’t say I understood Amber’s point of view (is she meant to be an angel? possibly?), but I don’t suppose that matters much. We might more be meant to see her as any catalyst that arrives in our own lives and asks us to imagine both how our life could be different, and how (much)/whether we want to change.
Filed under 100 Books of 2011, Book I'll Forget I Read, Fiction, Prize Winner
Freakonomics: More Freak than Nomics
Freakonomics proudly proclaims in its introduction, and again in its conclusion, that it is a book without a unified theme. This being the case, telling your reader there is no unifying theme (re: point) does not make this lack in any way… okay. While I enjoyed the disparate sections of the book for their confident tone, measured pace and didactic, (albeit sometimes overly hand-holding) explanations of everyday phenomena, I found the overall absence of an argument/organizing idea/central question to be frustrating and perplexing.
I am bothered by a book that claims to be about looking for relationships between far-fetched phenomena when it is really about an author having noticed two similar phenomena, having deduced plausible explanations, then grouped the two things together only to claim that the deductions came about as a result of novel questioning (questions like: what do a drug dealer and a sumo wrestler and an aborted fetus have in common?). Novel questioning might better be thought of as something like this: what makes this book without a theme, or apparent point, a bestseller?
Further minor complaints: “economists” are credited with doing much of the work of sociologists; cause-and-effect is not the same thing as “incentive” based decision making; causality and correlations often mysteriously swap when the given example requires.
Minor praise: a collaborative book always impresses me.
Filed under 100 Books of 2011, Book I'll Forget I Read
The Satanic Verses: A Better Book than I am Reader
Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses is the first book to fall victim to the time pressures of reading 100 books in a year. In my rush to read the book, and cross it off the list, and move on, I didn’t (at all) do justice to the richness of the text and found myself trying to skim sections that demanded close reading. I realize now that I will not (again) risk missing out on a brilliant book for the sake of a self-imposed list-making exercise. So be warned, there may be other two week hiatuses while I make my way through long and/or dense works.
So with the caveat that my sometimes confusion with plot sequencing probably had more to do with my inattention than with the book itself, I liked the book (I probably ought to love it, but again, my failure as a reader this go around). I enjoyed the interwoven narrative voices, temporal scopes and thematic questions: what does it mean to be a coherent and contiguous self? are relationships principally of convenience or of care? how much, or can we, take advantage of those we love and have them still love us? what does God have to do with any of these questions? That said, I didn’t necessarily enjoy the uneven introduction of metafictional techniques (it is only in the last, say, 100 pages that the ‘author’ begins to comment on these thematic questions and interrogate the action of his characters). Okay, so it’s a very small complaint.
The magic realism of Allie’s climb of Everest and the butterfly pilgrimage that then reverberate in the realist scenes are striking not for the “magic” (ooo aaa…. magical things integrated into reality) but for the reminder that magic isn’t someone surviving a fall from 30 000 feet, or the parting of an ocean, the real magic – the stuff that really ought to blow our minds – is the idea that a father can love a son after thirty years of not speaking; or that forgiveness is possible; or that a single person can hold within themselves competing feelings of love and hate and not be destroyed by those competing impulses. The magic, in other words, is reality.
Literary Vice 