peekle book blog

The most enjoyable Mary-Sue I’ve ever read. Hey, it’s short, and if I say much more, you won’t have much reason to read it.

Why, oh why did I wait so long to read this? Checked out of the library at the same time as Unquenchable Fire and Temporary Agency, it’s now been renewed as many times as it possibly can be. In fact, it’s due back the day after tomorrow– and there’s only 20 minutes left of today! Still, I look back over the other books I read, and wish I’d picked this one up sooner, that I could’ve had the experience of reading it sooner, that perhaps I could’ve spent more time reading it– though, to tell the truth, enjoyment would’ve probably pushed me to read it just as fast as I eventually did anyhow.

There’s no easy way to sum this one up, plot- or meaning-wise. I’m going to have to get a copy of it for myself… I know I’ll want to read it again.

I actually checked this book out because I’d seen the cover on a cover review site. I don’t read all that much in the way of memoirs, but this one was pretty interesting, a cowboy coming-of-age story. A bit, I don’t know, twee in spots, like poetry was running away with the author when plain language would’ve done best. It took me a long time to read, and I’m not really sure why.

It Got Away: HMS Surprise. I just can’t possibly read both Post Captain and this one before it’s due back at the library. That’ll learn-me-durn-me. One book in a series requested at once from now on.

“It moves with the goofy speed of a silent movie,” Stephen King wrote of the Bachman book The Running Man. And that, possibly, is the reason this book was published as a Bachman book long after the gig was up. It begins in a rush and pelts headlong manically through to the finish, drawing you helplessly along with it. There seems barely space to breathe, much less pay any attention to any flaws in plot or characterization. And then it’s over.

The book was published at the same time as another King book, Desperation, which features different characters with the same names — to no real effect, I thought, my first time through the pair. Maybe I’ll see something new this time through.

Update: Thrown Back: Desperation. I just couldn’t make myself even start.

At a friend’s house about a week ago, the Tripods came up in conversation. I’d first read the books twenty-some years ago, as a young child, and had read them many times since then. Of the three, I had really vivid memories of The City of Gold and Lead, and not much of the other two; as it turned out, when the time came to find them at the library, I didn’t even remember the name of the third.

Because they’re young adult novels, and because– even after at least fifteen years since my last read-through– they are very familiar to me, they are quick reads. Still very much classics of YA science fiction. The White Mountains took a few hours of a lazy Monday afternoon, and that’s with me telling myself repeatedly to slow down.

Was the book as good as I remembered it? Yes, it was. It still stirred my imagination, though maybe not in the same way it had when I was 9 and first reading it. In junior high, when I got into roleplaying games, I always wanted to run a game based on this series or on Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea, and I never did either.

My friend hadn’t ever read the actual trilogy, just a comic version of it in (I think) Boy’s Life. He said something that surprised me very much– that it was an alternate universe take on War of the Worlds where the Martians won. I had never thought of this– as I remember, some things in the second book would seem to rule this out– but it is a fascinating way to look at it.

If you’ll forgive the cliche, a cracking sea tale. The best I’ve read since Memoirs of a Buccaneer, and the first in a series of, what, 19? Lots of choice reading to come, I can tell. Intensely popular at the library right now, though, so it’ll be spread out a bit. Must be that movie with wossface and wotname…

The author has the good sense to send a nautical novice along with everyone so he can ask all the stupid questions you might otherwise have had about terminology, thought it did help that I’d researched period ships before. Somewhat. Still, you don’t really need to know exactly where all those sails are to enjoy the action.

I have few rules for what I write here; one of them is to write within half an hour of finishing a book. (These aren’t serious book reviews — sorry to dissapoint. I just want to remember exactly what I was thinking when I finished a book, before looking at and listening to other people’s opinions may have changed my mind.)

The fact that I finished Rose Madder on Saturday and am writing about it six days later says a lot. (This entry is back-dated to provide an accurate listing.)

Take the movie “Sleeping With the Enemy”, add pointless supernatural elements, ratchet up the gore, and you get Rose Madder. It’s tied to the Dark Tower series, according to the listing at the beginning of “Wolves of the Calla”, but only through vocabulary; the book is just as tied to any of the other King books it jokingly references. The book is told from two different viewpoints, and one is set entirely in italics — sometimes for page after page, which makes it very difficult to read. The build-up is good but the payoff is meh, and only the extended coda rescues the book even a little bit. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if this were a second pass at a much earlier “trunk novel”.

I wish the first book of 2004 was better.

It Got Away: I didn’t read Coraline soon enough and it had to go back to the library. Ah, well, I’ll get it again.

I had to fight hard to start this book, because I kept wanting to compare it to David Sedaris’ stuff, and it just didn’t stack up. Once it did start I read it in one big crunch and finished thinking that it just didn’t stack up to David Sedaris’ stuff. It may seem unfair, I suppose, but the parallels are definitely there, right on top and not hidden at all. If I were unkind, I could say I doubt this book would’ve been published without Sedaris’ before it.

And Burroughs’ writing just doesn’t have the humor or the humanity of, say, Naked; it seems a bit flat. Not exactly wasted time, but I wish I’d read a different book.