After (mostly) taking a break from running over the summer, I’ve started to get back into it. Super slow but I’m building up mileage again and getting ready for Ragnar Napa. I took a bad fall the other day and my hand still looks awful and hurts like hell. I will spare you the photo of my gross hand so please enjoy Bubba in a laundry basket instead.
Ok, I hate saying things like this, but I feel the author of The Bed Moved must have some friends in the industry or something. There is certainly a spark of talent here, but how on earth did this merit a book? 23 stories in 140 pages? This is scant, my friend. I mean, this isn’t a case of ‘oh look at the masterful way of saying so much with so little.’ No, this is maybe two good stories’ worth of material. I’m kind of offended on behalf of writers who toil away for years by this book that feels like it was written on a cocktail napkin.
Anyway, on the other end of the spectrum was The Sparsholt Affair. Not scant by any means. This really took its time and was kind of a frustrating read. Sometimes it would get absolutely riveting, then swerve into very dull overly descriptive passages which went on forever and nothing happened. For me this definitely got better as it went along; it won me over in the end but I don’t know how strongly I could recommend it.
The Italian Teacher falls into the interesting failure category for me. I didn’t really care for this, but I’d love to hear what the author has to say about it. I loved his first book but I haven’t read anything else from him. This is perfectly well written and a decent story and all that, but the main character is such a nothing loser. Not in an interesting way, but in a ‘why on earth do you want to center your novel on this guy’ way. I absolutely did not care what happened to him at any point. I didn’t love this by any means but it definitely got under my skin and I’ll remember it more than many books that I liked better. A weird one.
I’m almost done with the much hyped The Golden State, and once again, I am frustrated. Maybe it’s just me! The story is fine, and I can live with the fact that the reader is spending virtually the entire book inside the main character’s head. But I just cannot completely get on board with the weird run on sentence writing style. I have no doubt that the editor of The Millions knows how to use a comma, so clearly it’s a deliberate choice; I don’t know what she’s going for with that but it feels like intellectual slumming to me. I’m curious to see how this turns out but no matter what I am docking a star for the weird comma thing. We’ll see what happens!
