Review of the Day: Empire Falls

Empire Falls is Richard Russo's Pulitzer-winning story of the Roby family of Empire Falls, Maine.

Russo tells the tale primarily from the point of view of the recently-divorced Miles Roby. Miles struggles to make a go of the Empire Grill, get out from under the thumb of the town doyenne, maintain his relationship with his teen age daughter, settle a feud with a local cop, understand his parents, and overcome his fear of heights so he can paint the church steeple.

This is an engrossing, meaty read. It is a great, old-fashioned yarn, meaning it has a strong, coherent plot; fully-developed characters; drama; a reasonable tempo; and more than a few thought-provoking ideas. Thoroughly entertaining.

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Review: All the Pretty Horses

All the Pretty Horses is the bastard offspring of a mating between Ernest Hemingway and Zane Gray, with some William Faulkner apparent in the DNA.

It was his horse. And it was a good horse. And he rode the horse. When it was night, he hobbled the horse by a stream and both boy and horse drank from the cold water of the stream . . . .

So, maybe that is not a direct quote, but it captures the essence.

Not that it is a bad book. There is plenty of exciting plot to keep it moving along, at least after the plodding first chapter. The story of John Grady Cole’s adventures in Mexico is riveting, involving vagabonds, a lovely senorita, her rich rancher father, Mexican prisons, murder, escape, and lots and lots of horses.

But the characters, with the exception of the fascinating aunt, are one-dimensional. Cole is a particularly wooden hero. It is apparent that McCarthy intended him as an archetype, but his approach of always doing the right thing, damn the consequences, becomes wearily repetitive. By the time he reaches his final soul-searching scene with a sympathetic judge back in Texas, he has become a stoic goody two shoes.

All the Pretty Horses won the National Book Award in 1992 and is the first of the three novels in McCarthy’s oft-praised “Border Trilogy,” followed by The Crossing and Cities of the Plain. Hopefully, the later books will keep the same spirit of adventure, but drop the Hemingway parody and add character development.

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Summer Reading Lists: Why Bother?

OK, the Summer Reading List I started with has gotten all cattywhompus in less than a week, so I am starting over. This new list reflects that I finished several of the books on the first list, I added a couple of early review books that I had forgotten about, and I decided on an arbitrary method of selecting which books on my iPod to listen to next. Here is the latest version of my Summer Reading List, which is really just a list of the next 10 books I plan to read (subject to change at whim) in roughly the order of reading them: Bridge of Sighs by Olen Steinhauer (Which I am listening to now); Resistance Fighter by Jorgen Kieler (about the Danish resistance movement in WWII); Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert (which I've been avoiding but the book club chose); The Cossacks by Leo Tolstoy (next up on my iPod); America, America by Ethan Canin (one of the early review books I forgot about); The Seven Dials Mystery by Agatha Christie (which I have been carrying around in my car for emergencies); The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud (also on my iPod); Abbeville by Jack Fuller (another for which I need to write a review); My Uncle Oswald by Roald Dahl (so I can completely finish his Omnibus); and The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien (because I have never read it and so plan to listen to the audio version).

Review: Midnight's Children

Midnight’s Children is the pseudo-autobiography of Saleem Sinai, the first baby born in independent India. Saleem tells the story of his life, as enmeshed in the history of the first 31 years of post-colonial India and entwined in the lives of the other 1,000 children born between midnight and 1:00 a.m. on the first day of the new country. Saleem describes this complicated, vivid, magical, funny, and disturbing mix as the "chutnification of history."

This was the first novel Salman Rushdie wrote and the first of his that I have read. I could kick myself for waiting so long. This book is a delight. There is a reason it show up on so many lists, including: Booker Prize Winners Modern Library's Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century Radcliffe's Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century

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Pondering on Life of Pi and Others

After reading a recent review of Life of Pi on The Complete Booker, I have been pondering memorable books in general and Booker winners in particular. I remembered that I really loved Life of Pi while I read it. I thought it was an incredible book. But I also realized that it is a novel that did not stick with me. I never find myself thinking about it, much as I loved it at the time. On the other hand, there are plenty of books that did not pack the same wallop, but I dwell on them for years after -- for example, Last Orders by Graham Swift (1996 Booker winner): Or, The Old Devils by Kinglsley Amis (1986 Booker winner): Why is this? Why do some books linger, while others might pop, but then fade?