Review of the Day: The Adventures of Augie March

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow won the National Book Award in 1964. The story follows the life of the eponymous hero from childhood in Chicago, through a sojourn in Mexico with a zany huntress, to life on the seas in the Merchant Marines. Full of Bellow's over-the-top characters and riddled with discourses on Big Ideas, Augie is a great American hero. Bellow is a treasure.

Favorite Author: Lee Child

Lee Child writes Jack Reacher books. Thankfully for all his loyal fans -- "Reacher Creatures" -- he turns out a new one pretty much every year.

Reacher is the prototypical hero. He is big and strong and smart and he drifts around solving unsolvable problems. He doesn't need anything besides his folding toothbrush and a little folding money. (Confronted with the reality of our post-9/11 world, Reacher started carrying a passport and an ATM card in later books -- a stumbling block for loyal readers.) He can calculate the trajectory of a bullet. He can kill a man with his thumb. He's cool.

I have read all but the last two of Lee Child's Jack Reacher books.

The books in publication order are:

Killing Floor
Die Trying
Tripwire
Running Blind
Echo Burning
Persuader
Without Fail
The Enemy
One Shot
The Hard Way
Bad Luck and Trouble
Nothing to Lose
Gone Tomorrow
61 Hours
Worth Dying For (reviewed here)
The Affair
A Wanted Man
Never Go Back
Personal
Make Me
Night School
The Midnight Line

Past Tense

Blue Moon

NOTE
Last updated April 5, 2021.

Review of the Day: The Shell Seekers

The Shell Seekers by Rosamunde Pilcher is a plot-driven family saga centered around Penelope Sterne, daughter of an artist and mother of three unlikable adult children (well, two are outright unlikable; one is supposed to be admirable but is singularly off-putting). Penelope, now 64 and suffering from a weak ticker, putters in her English garden, ponders her past, and considers how and when to dispose of the few of her father’s now-valuable art works in her possession.

The story moves right along at a bracing clip, through lengthy detours into Penelope’s childhood in Cornwall, Britain’s WWII home front, and the younger daughter’s sojourn in Ibiza. It is an enjoyable read, well-deserving of it’s decades of popularity.

Only in retrospect does the novel disappoint. The main weakness is a lack of character development. The characters spring fully-formed onto the page. The “good” people are all generous, hard-working, independent, and bluntly forthright. (They are also startlingly unsentimental.) The “bad” folks are greedy, vain, self-centered, and silly. None of them change, either individually or in relation to the others. When the narrative reaches its chronologically natural ending, resolution of the various threads is brusquely efficient, but not convincing or satisfying.

Overall, it is an entertaining but unfulfilling read.

'Bye 'Bye 1776

I am giving up on 1776 by David McCullough. Normally, I am too task-oriented to not finish a book once I start it, but I find it easier to drop an audio book than a paper book. Maybe there is something too immediately tactile about abandoning a paper book, while stopping the audio book is more of a "virtual" abandonment. In any event, I only got through about two hours of the 12 hours of 1776. Nothing against McCullough's writing, which is first rate, but I simply do not enjoy stories about battles. The guns, the tents, the weather, the food, the boots, the horses -- none of it interests me. I did not realize that this book was all about fighting the first year of the Revolutionary War. So, great book. Just not my cup of tea.

Review of the Day: The Centaur

Despite its title, I was surprised by how myth-centric The Centaur is. It is the story of a high school science teacher and his student son. It is also John Updike's re-telling of the myth of the centaur Chiron who, wounded, gives his life (his immortality) to Prometheus.

This is a book I may appreciate more in the recollection. While reading it, I was distracted by the allegory. Sometimes, the mythical references were too vague or convoluted to catch and I had to refer to the index at the back to make sure I wasn't missing something important. But at times, the myth is more than allegory -- it is right there in the middle of the action. Updike sometimes refers to the hero as Chiron and describes his hooves clacking on the school stairs, for instance. I found the switch from allegory to action to be jarring.

Also, the hero was annoying, not just to me as a reader, but to his son, wife, and co-workers in the story. I can't figure out how his unlikeability ties in with the myth of Chiron.

I read this because it won the National Book Award in 1964. I prefer his Rabbit novels.