Charity added a quote:
"You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing, just as soon as they've tried everything else..." — Winston S. Churchill

Charity added a quote:
"If you cannot read all your books...fondle them---peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them, at any rate, be your acquaintances." — Winston S. Churchill

Charity read and liked Christina Stind's review of Wonder Boys:

"What does a boa constrictor, a tuba, a transvestite, Marilyn Monroe's jacket, a man called Crabtree, a lot of pot, a car with buttprints and a blind dog have in common? They all crosses Grady Tripp's path in the course of two days where Tripp's wife ...more What does a boa constrictor, a tuba, a transvestite, Marilyn Monroe's jacket, a man called Crabtree, a lot of pot, a car with buttprints and a blind dog have in common? They all crosses Grady Tripp's path in the course of two days where Tripp's wife finds out that he has a mistress and that she is pregnant...
So this is no ordinary weekend and Tripp finds himself in one awkward situation after the others. Towards the end, you as the reader finds yourself thinking "figures!" every time something new and weird happens to him. So much bad happens that you are really not surprised anymore - he's just having a really bad weekend.
On top of all this he's trying to finish his 2000+ pages next novel called Wonder Boys and that is really not happening either - so not much is looking up for Tripp.

This book reminded me of Man gone Down by Michael Thomas in that they both takes place over a few days and our narrator is out of luck and trying to get his life back together. But the narrator in this book experiences rather more weird events than in Thomas's book - maybe in part because he's stoned out for most of the book and therefore can't be said to really make any good decisions at all - throughout the book! And that's what makes this book fun to read.

Or fun - well, it's not laugh out loud, slapping your knees fun - but it's amusing - and the last 80 pages or so was amazing. I really liked the book all the way through but the last pages were just so good in tying it all together. Only thing that prevented it from getting a five star rating is that sometimes the language gets in the way. Chabon writes it so well - but a few times I found myself stopping out and re-reading a sentence because it was just so heavy, beautifully written, but heavy. I found myself doing this with Gabriel Marcia Marquez as well but with him it was because it was so beautiful that I had to stop and enjoy it. Here, the language itself stopped me - and didn't further my reading at those points.

But putting aside those few places, this was a book I really enjoyed and I'm looking forward to reading more by Michael Chabon.(less) "