Mostly borrowed
Sep. 5th, 2009 11:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraOnce again I am ridiculously far behind on this (well, okay, about 20 books). Part of the problem is that I am unhappy with some of the partial reviews I have done and am waiting for inspiration to strike. Or possibly for the book to turn up again from wherever I've hidden it, so I don't have to Google for reviews to get character names and get distracted.
Elizabeth George, Careless in red. This is perfectly competent in terms of character – I particularly like Lynley being not just scruffy (in that appealing angsty hero way) but actually filthy, with unbrushed teeth and stained clothes after his grief-driven walk along the Cornwall coastline – and Havers does show up, but the central murder mystery never engaged me. I liked her last one much more than I expected, and this is both a bit of a let-down and something that makes me think her heart may no longer be in the standard detective/mystery format any more.
Markus Zusak, The book thief. I was ambivalent about reading this at all, because the ending of The Messenger annoyed me so much. This is a better book, because the central story is strong enough to handle Zusak’s compulsive messing around with narrative – in this case, via having Death as a narrator. Death sounds like a early 20s male university student who is still convinced he knows better than everyone else, and his failure to demonstrate it so far is only proof of his eventual brilliance. I should point out that I have no objection to messing around with narrative, but here I don’t think it works – it feels like the author jumping up and down going, “this is a story! I wrote it! Watch me do this next bit!”. Possibly I am on edge because The Messenger does the exact same thing, but really. I am quite happy being told about who is going to die and when, and think that works well, but it’s the character of Death and the sheer portentousness of all his (its?) chunks of narrative that I really didn’t want.
But. The essential story is very good, and the central relationships - Liesel and Max, the Hubermanns, who shelter both of them (one officially and one not), the mayor’s wife, who allows Liesel to steal books – are all convincing. I was a bit less convinced by Liesel’s rebellious friend, Rudy, and it's entirely possible that I am, in general, not all that impressed by Zusak's male characters. Morris Gleitzman's Then, which I still haven't written up because it was one of the best books I read last year and I meant to make more of that, is, however, a better Australian-authored WWII experienced by children book, and regardless of whether or not you go anywhere near The Book Thief you should still track Then down. It is, technically, the sequel to Once, but I read Then first without realising, and in some ways I think that may actually be the best approach.
Two Jasper Ffordes. I think the first of these (Something rotten) may be a re-read. I found the Thursday Next series subject to a more than usually rapid case of diminishing returns, and so bailed on them, but they’re still enjoyable, if patchy, and the second one (First among sequels) does have some interesting moments. I do feel that the bookworld appears strangely confined, in many respects – works not in English? Picture books? Graphic novels? Experimental short stories in small press magazines? – but the mechanical metaphors are entertaining (the footnoterphone, the piano-swapping). The second one does rely on Thursday not telling her husband something obvious in order to further the plot, which is less irritating than that bit in the first ever book where Fforde breaks pov to solve a plot problem, but both of these things may bother me more than they do other readers..
Elizabeth George, Careless in red. This is perfectly competent in terms of character – I particularly like Lynley being not just scruffy (in that appealing angsty hero way) but actually filthy, with unbrushed teeth and stained clothes after his grief-driven walk along the Cornwall coastline – and Havers does show up, but the central murder mystery never engaged me. I liked her last one much more than I expected, and this is both a bit of a let-down and something that makes me think her heart may no longer be in the standard detective/mystery format any more.
Markus Zusak, The book thief. I was ambivalent about reading this at all, because the ending of The Messenger annoyed me so much. This is a better book, because the central story is strong enough to handle Zusak’s compulsive messing around with narrative – in this case, via having Death as a narrator. Death sounds like a early 20s male university student who is still convinced he knows better than everyone else, and his failure to demonstrate it so far is only proof of his eventual brilliance. I should point out that I have no objection to messing around with narrative, but here I don’t think it works – it feels like the author jumping up and down going, “this is a story! I wrote it! Watch me do this next bit!”. Possibly I am on edge because The Messenger does the exact same thing, but really. I am quite happy being told about who is going to die and when, and think that works well, but it’s the character of Death and the sheer portentousness of all his (its?) chunks of narrative that I really didn’t want.
But. The essential story is very good, and the central relationships - Liesel and Max, the Hubermanns, who shelter both of them (one officially and one not), the mayor’s wife, who allows Liesel to steal books – are all convincing. I was a bit less convinced by Liesel’s rebellious friend, Rudy, and it's entirely possible that I am, in general, not all that impressed by Zusak's male characters. Morris Gleitzman's Then, which I still haven't written up because it was one of the best books I read last year and I meant to make more of that, is, however, a better Australian-authored WWII experienced by children book, and regardless of whether or not you go anywhere near The Book Thief you should still track Then down. It is, technically, the sequel to Once, but I read Then first without realising, and in some ways I think that may actually be the best approach.
Two Jasper Ffordes. I think the first of these (Something rotten) may be a re-read. I found the Thursday Next series subject to a more than usually rapid case of diminishing returns, and so bailed on them, but they’re still enjoyable, if patchy, and the second one (First among sequels) does have some interesting moments. I do feel that the bookworld appears strangely confined, in many respects – works not in English? Picture books? Graphic novels? Experimental short stories in small press magazines? – but the mechanical metaphors are entertaining (the footnoterphone, the piano-swapping). The second one does rely on Thursday not telling her husband something obvious in order to further the plot, which is less irritating than that bit in the first ever book where Fforde breaks pov to solve a plot problem, but both of these things may bother me more than they do other readers..
