October was unprecedentedly productive in the literary department even with a week of obscene dental annoyance. No doubt it's attributable to the fact that I've lowered my standards of 'acceptable' literature slightly to include more modern books. Overall I'd say that this batch was pretty enjoyable if not overwhelmingly informative in all cases.
Oh, also, if you find any of these titles interesting please feel free to let me know and I'll happily lend you my copy. All I ask is a short written assessment when you're done to be shared in this venue. (well, and to have the book back of course.)
The Reluctant Fundamentalist [Hamid] - 2007 Booker Prize (Short List) [*****]
In The Reluctant Fundamentalist Hamid follows a Pakistani man who comes to America to get his education and make his fortune in a business-valuation firm. Everything seems to go along quite swimmingly until the 9/11 attacks and our protagonist begins to have some misgivings about his adopted society. While entirely fictional I have to imagine that this storyline has the ring of truth for many immigrants to this country. I can't recommend this one highly enough for it's portrayal of a point of view that we don't see nearly often enough. On a stylistic level, my wife found it a bit difficult to weave her way through though. The book is written as a story within a story wherein the narrator interacts with his audience as the tale unfolds. This can be a trifle unnerving but I found it to be quite endearing.
Citizen Vince [Walter] - 2006 Edgar Award - Best Novel [*** 1/2]
For Vince, after years as a small-time petty crook working for the mob, it was finally time to go straight. Not that that's as easy as it might seem, especially when you're just a baker trying to make donuts for a living. Citizen Vince is a slightly gritty crime novel with a somewhat entertaining twist and a legitimate attempt at a moral. It does little to endear me to the genre but at least was sufficient to make me leave the Edgar Award winners on my reading TODO list.
The Nice and the Good [Murdock] - 1969 Booker Prize (Short List) [***]
This was the last of the 69 Booker Nominees on my TODO list and I think that with one exception I was pretty unexcited about all of them. The Nice and the Good is a unnecessarily prolix morality tale that can be summed up pretty completely by the text of the back cover. Despite the weakness of the theme some of the actual details are relatively entertaining. The novel is rife with sexuality that runs the gamut from homosexual to cuckold to Satan worshiper and while there is a small amount of plot this is a character study. None of them good mind you, merely nice.
God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything [Hitchens] - 2007 National Book Award Nominee [Non-Fiction] [***]
This bit of intellectual argument was the last of eight reads for the month and it almost didn't make it into the list at all. Hitchen's thesis is a very common one and one that I tend to agree with in principle but his delivery is so caustic that it tends to lose both halves of his audience. No religious person will be moved by his statements as he begins with such obvious hatred and disdain that nobody can wade through the maze of attacks the first 20 pages represent. By the time he finally settles down into a less vigorous polemic one cannot help but take all he says with a grain of salt. While I want to believe that the Catholic Church was complicit with Hitler's extermination of the Jews, for example, I find myself unable to take Hitchens' word for it by the time he gets around to saying it. Grains of salt aside though, in those areas in which I have some independent knowledge (nonsensical nature of the Bible, Christian sexual mutilation of male children, devolution of the church into 'entertainment', bizarre origins and beliefs of the Mormon church) I find it hard not to agree with the author almost completely. If even half of what he says is true, we're all in some deep shit. But then again, mankind generally is.
No comments:
Post a Comment