Book Report

I’ve read several good books lately, all different, and all ones I would recommend reading.

 

The first in this latest list is one about which I actually called my mother before I was done reading it and told her to check it out from the library.  It’s The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson.  It started slowly, but as it built, it became more and more absurd and more and more funny.  There are a few books that make me laugh out loud while I’m reading them and even fewer from which I’ll bother to read passages out loud to Tony; this was one of those rare books.  Things just kept getting crazier and crazier – it reminded me of a Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker movie.  So, I guess if you liked Airplane! or The Naked Gun, for instance, you might like this book.

 

When I last did a book report, I was about to start Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson.  What’s with reading about geriatrics lately?  I honestly don’t know, but I do know that this was a wonderful novel about an old man confronting prejudice in his sleepy English town and learning to live his life again.  It had an element of “Oh! I know someone exactly like that!” about it, which makes things a bit more fun.  Also, there’s a distinct “watching a trainwreck” feeling I got during a couple of parts of the book – a feeling that can sometimes bother me and cause me to feel embarrassment on the part of the characters, but in this case was more of the “I can’t look away!” variety.

 

Are you among the few people left in the world who have not read The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini?  There’s a reason it was a best-seller for so long.  Maybe, if you’re like me, you haven’t picked it up yet because you thought it would be painfully sad.  I don’t mind emotion in the novels I read, but I do tend to bypass books that look like their sole purpose is to make me cry.  This was not one of those books, thankfully, and I’m glad I checked it out.  It is sad, it is poignant, but it’s also comedic and beautifully written and full of hope.  I love stories of hope and I adore stories of redemption, even if things don’t always turn out wonderfully.

 

I read Elizabeth Kostova’s The Swan Thieves and I was not nearly as enamored by it as I was with The Historian.  Both were back-and-forth in time books, but The Swan Thieves was just more boring.  I guess reading about a lonely nineteenth-century impressionist artist and her totally staid love affair with an older man and how it relates but doesn’t relate to a modern artist’s weird obsession and psychotic episode just didn’t grab me in the same way that Vlad the Impaler did in The Historian.  Also, it was really, really loooong.

 

Time again for you to tell me what YOU’RE reading.  Is it good?  I’m adding to my library wish list since I know that I’ll be spending many overnight hours awake, nursing and infant, in no time at all.