bookshelves: 2009, fiction-adult, short-fiction
The blurbs on the back of the book pretty much say it all: "Complete crap from beginning to end." or "...extremely redundant and wandering. The kind of book that makes you feel like you've wasted precious hours of your life for nothing."
I enjoyed this book more when I was younger, now I just wonder how I didn't see then how utterly stupid it is. Here's a quotation from You Can Tell Them I'm Coming. And Hell's Coming With Me, which is probably the truest bit in this book:
So you're probably asking yourself, as you most assuredly must, does he have a point? Is he going to take this somewhere or be conveniently ambiguous so as to escape some kind of finality. Does he do it on purpose? They're valid questions. Questions that I one day hope to answer for you... My name's Matt and I have nowhere to go. I, like the roller coaster, always end in the same place. Right here, it would seem. ]]>
bookshelves: 2009, fiction-adult, science-fiction
Really enjoyable book. I didn't like certain aspects of Stephenson's style and could have done without the entire Fido/Rat Thing subplot, but there was a lot I really liked, particularly the idea of language as a virus. (Wish I'd read this book back when I was taking linguistics in school - bet I could have wrangled an essay out of it without really trying.) ]]>
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"Whenever a pirate vessel comes into view, they all take turns looking at it through the sight, playing with all the different sensor modes.."
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bookshelves: 2009, crime-mystery-thriller, fiction-young-adult
An entertaining and enjoyable enough mystery about two sixth-graders - Calder and Petra - who find themselves, through a number of coincidences, the only two people able to rescue a stolen painting by Vermeer. For the most part the book rolls along pretty quickly, but it's a bit draggy in some areas and the ending is ridiculous (the coincidences too many, and a bit too tidy a wrap-up). I imagine younger readers would enjoy the code aspect, but I found it annoying to decipher the letters from Calder's friend, so I quit trying and just relied on what came after to work out their contents.
I'll probably never read this book again, but I'll keep it around in case I ever know a 11 year old in need of something to read. ]]>
bookshelves: 2009, crime-mystery-thriller, fiction-adult
Not at all my usual sort of thing, but enjoyable nevertheless. It wasn't as scary as I'd hoped it would be and a little too long, but enjoyable. ]]>
bookshelves: 2009, fantasy, fiction-young-adult
A really fantastic book. I wish he'd written it for adults, since I'd have liked to see a more creepy and danger-ridden version of this story, but it was wonderful as it is. ]]>
bookshelves: 2009, memoir-biography, non-fiction
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bookshelves: 2009, fiction-adult
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bookshelves: 2009, fiction-adult
I picked this one up as part of my continuing efforts to read all the winners of the Giller prize. (I've read 12, I think, of 16.) MG Vassanji is a two-time winner of the prize and his other winner, The Book of Secrets, is still on my to-be-read pile. (It's also on my mental to-be-bought list, but one day...)
From The New Yorker, a description: In this novel set among Kenya's Indian diaspora, two ill-fated loves—Vikram Lall's for a young English girl, his sister's for a young African man—symbolize their family's tenuous social position as neither privileged oppressor nor righteous oppressed. Vikram, now in exile in Canada, recounts Kenya's painful process of decolonization and his own role laundering money for government officials, an activity that he justifies as the survival tactic of one considered "inherently disloyal" because of his race.
I enjoyed this book; I wasn't sure if I would. It has a sort of slow movement and beginning, a sort of memoir of someone you're not sure you're interested in knowing. But then the background and the history, the Mau Mau Uprising and then Independence and the corruption later began to interest me, as well as the in-betweenness of Vikram and his family - Indians who consider themselves African, but who nevertheless do not feel they belong in the country they call home.
I think what keeps me from giving this book 5 stars is the dispassionate retelling of the story. Vikram does talk about his coldness, but somehow his disengagement kept me just that much disengaged as well. ]]>