Hello!

I don't really have much to say about A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 by Simon Winchester other than it's a good book to have read prior to the 100th anniversary of the quake, which occurs this April 18. I wan't that fond of the book. I thought Winchester spent way too much time on, say, Pangea, and not enough on San Francisco. It was interesting, but I could have done without a lot of the history of plate tectonic theory and used some more on, you know, the 1906 earthquake.

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Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

nobody@vox.com(mat!) — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 18:05:23 -0700

I was looking for something really different from No Country For Old Men, and found it in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. I'd seen the reviews for this book, but I had been wary of it--I was expecting lots of hipsterism and New Lit Tomfoolery. But after reading the review on Large-Hearted Boy I gave it a shot, and it absolutely crushed me. I don't think any other book has made me contemplate my own mortality as much. And it has forced me to think about what Harper or I would do if one of us died. It really threw me, and I loved it.

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Blankets: An Illustrated Novel

nobody@vox.com(mat!) — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 18:03:56 -0700

I spent a week without a book, and then picked up Blankets: by Craig Thompson. It was another book that I'd long been interested in, but I bought it on a whim when I was getting my friend Andy a birthday present at the comics shop. It was beautifully told and drawn, and I (like, I'm sure, many people from flyover states who move to the Big City) really found that I could relate to his story on a personal level. I finished it the same night I began, and then re-read much of it again the next day.

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The Da Vinci Code: Special Illustrated Edition : A Novel

nobody@vox.com(mat!) — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 18:00:43 -0700

I'm not even going to link to this piece of shit. I hated this book. It left me with a deep sense of resentment and a feeling of overwhelming derision for those who put this turd-paper on the best-seller list. Perhaps it's that I came off of two excellent books. Or maybe it's because of all the hype, which led me to have very high expectations. It could even be that due to a comparative religion class I took in college, I was already familiar with the gnostic gospels as well as several of the tinfoil-hat theories Brown espoused. But I tend to think it's because this fucking suckfest of a book novelized-screenplay isn't worth the match you'd use to burn it. Reading this wormfood was about as enjoyable as a urinary tract infection. I found myself plowing my way through it just to be finished; just to put it the fuck behind me. I had wanted to read it before the culture became totally saturated by the movie. Harper warned me it would probably stink. Do you really expect anything that popular to be good, she asked. Harry Potter! I replied. Harry Potter, Harry Potter, Harry Potter! But I was way fucking wrong. And for what it's worth, none of my complaints have to do with religion. I'm not Catholic, and I've had more "mind-blowing" revelations thrown my way by tenth-grade stoners brandishing dollar bills who can't even pronounce illuminati porperly. Here are my main beefs with this fucktarded tome:<ol> <LI>It's poorly written. Admittedly, that's the least of the problems. I don't expect my page-turner mysteries to be Faulkner. If you have a great imagination, and no way with words, I still want to hear your story. Sure, I'd prefer it if every best-selling author could write like Michael Chabon, or even Stephen King, but for pure action-driven storytelling, your actual use of language is among the least important aspects. Yet the writing in this book was so bad that it made me aware of the fact that I was reading. It was unintentional post-modernism, in a way, although that makes it sound somewhat appealing. Which it was not. <LI>The Wikipedia entries I know, I know. There aren't really any Wikipedia entries. But there might as well have been. It's often essential for a book to tell you a back story necessary to advancing the plot, without incorporating it into the main narrative. Yet there are both elegant and awkward ways to do this. The Da Vinci Code follows the latter method. Sometimes it seemed like Brown wasn't even trying. I felt like he should have at least have had the decency to warn me: OKAY I AM GOING TO DROP IN A PAGE FROM A TEXTBOOK ON GNOSTIC HISTORY HERE. In fact, that would have been more elegant than Brown's sudden digressions. <LI>There was no mystery to this mystery And really, this was the unforgivable thing. It's supposed to be a mystery, dammit. And when you, as a mystery writer, give your readers enough hints that not only are there no surprises, but you leave them feeling deadened to your eventual "revelations," then you have failed. I found it odd that I figured out that the teacher was Leigh, Remy wasn't to be trusted, the knight was Newton, and the orb was an apple well before the smarty-smart-smart-smart Harvard professor did. And as to the family being the descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalene? Well. If you didn't see that coming--even factoring in Brown's cheating by first telling his readers that they are not--you need to get some damn glasses. Oh. And in case you're pissed about all the spoilers in this graf; I'm only doing it for your own good. </ol> There were other issues as well (notably plot elements left hanging), but I've already wasted enough of my life on this booger bible and now I shall endeavor to put it behind me.

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Skinny Dip (Hiaasen, Carl)

nobody@vox.com(mat!) — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 17:59:35 -0700

I took a break in the middle of GG&S to read Skinny Dip by Carl Hiaasen. Like almost all his books, it's fast-paced, has an environmental theme, and very, very funny. Several old characters pop up here to say hello again. It's a really quick read, too. I think I finished this book over breakfast.

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