Summary Judgments: Book Report

I spied this in Laura's classroom.

Read any good books lately? I've polished off a couple of the books I got for my birthday last month, so I ran right over to tell you guys, naturally.

The new Stephen King book, Under the Dome: you know, I really got into this, all thousand pages of it. I liked the premise--one day an invisible, impenetrable dome appears, trapping a small town--and I liked that there were eleventy hundred characters, though you know that a book might be a tad too long when the list of dramatis personae in the front includes "Dogs of Note." Even though it was super long, that sucker moved. The style did not get in the way, for the most part. And there was very little of that weird crazy-person-thinking-in-italics shit that you get in his stuff. I mean, we know that King is not Cormac McCarthy, right? There were a few clunkers, but mostly he just told the story, which is what I like.

After I turned the last page, I thought, you know, in my lifetime I have gotten hundreds of hours of entertainment from Stephen King, even though I never think about him and wouldn't list him among my favorite authors. I think I read The Shining when I was in the 6th grade--way to monitor my reading, Mom and Dad--and many, many of his books since then. Here are the props I haven't been giving you, Stephen King. So, as fifth-graders say at the end of book reports, if you wanna know what happens to the small town and what the deal with the dome is, you'll have to read the book. Or email me and I'll tell you everything.

The Glass Room by Simon Mawer: This was a finalist for the Booker prize last year. It tells the story of a married couple in the new Czechoslovakia in the 1920's. She's very refined, he's a rich Jewish industrialist, and they commission a great architect to build them a modern house with a stunning, glass-walled pavilion. So, Central Europe, the 1920's and 30's, there's not a cloud in the sky, right? I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

It's a very good book. If you like Alan Furst or other fiction set in this time and place, you'll be into this. I am always wary (and weary) when I start reading a book and feel like I've stepped into a huge pile of metaphor (José Saramago's Blindness, anyone?) and I was a little worried that The Glass Room would go that way, with a whole, like, "there's this room and it's made of glass so everyone can see inside, but somehow the human heart is still mysterious" thing.

But it is way better than that. The characters and their entanglements are gripping even without the dramatic historical backdrop. And I don't know if the story of what modernism in art and architecture meant in this period has been told better than this--the way these people had just emerged from a nightmare of empire and then war, hoping to finally build things that were new and unencumbered by the past, only to run smack into a new, nightmarish present. It's worth reading for the portrait of their sensibilities alone. Also there is some hanky panky. And Nazis.

And then there's the book everybody has been chattering about, and I just saw that it's the #1 seller on Amazon, Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. I read an excerpt of this in New York Magazine--go here to read it if you are interested in what a total scuzz John Edwards really is--and then I clicked over and ordered it faster than you can say OMG JUICY. And that's what it is, a juicy picture of all the personalities involved in the presidential campaign. I am halfway through it, and so far everyone, really everyone except Mr. and Mrs. 44, comes off as borderline-mentally ill. Interesting and a TOTAL BEACH READ, fo' sho'.

Ooh, and have you read The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova? It's from several years back. I read it twice and recommended it to everyone I know. It is a mystery, and a historical novel, and a Dracula story. It's edu-thrilling. If you haven't read it, and you like stuff that's awesome, go get it. Then come back and listen to this news: her new novel just came out last week, The Swan Thieves. I didn't even know about it until today, but I'm looking forward to reading it, even though I'm afraid I'll be disappointed. Historian is that good.

Anybody wanna weigh in on these? There are a few other books but I'll save them for a future post. This is probably an overdose of my opinions as it is. Also, in the interest of full disclosure, if you actually buy one of these books after clicking on one of my links, Amazon will give me, I believe, a nickel. Which I will probably put towards purchasing a boxed cake mix, or some Corona Light. So please think carefully about whether you want to subsidize that kind of behavior.