I don’t often stop reading a book. I may be guilty at times of putting a book aside with a bookmark in place while I tackle something else, but I usually intend to go back. I usually do go back, although somewhere in the house there is a hardcover copy of Clive Barker’s Imajica, purchase at the time it was released, with a bookmark about 1/3 of the way in.
I stopped reading Peter Carey’s His Illegal Self last night and no bookmark registers the point at which I stopped, because I have no intention of going back. My eyes slid over the words on the pages without absorbing much. Plot, perhaps. Characterization, a little. Intent, not at all. I found it tedious, repetitive and stuffy. I’m not a literary snob—I swear!—but this one just seemed so abstracted from anything interesting that I decided: life’s too short and the stack is too high. The book reviewed well, although I did find a NY Times review that was sympathetic to my view. I was relieved. I might be in a slim minority, but wasn’t just me.
Instead, I picked up The Miracle at Speedy Motors by Alexander McCall Smith, part of the The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series set in Botswana. I haven’t read any of the previous books, but that isn’t a real hindrance to enjoying this one. So far, it seems like a “cozy” mystery (think Miss Marple) with a female detective whose cases are mild and benign, but I’m open to the possibility that something brutal might happen. Part of the joy of the book is the small town politics that are easily recognizable even if the context is foreign. I mean, Botswana, after all. How many people could pick that country out on a map of Africa to within 500 miles? (It’s right above South Africa, for the record). I’m about five chapters in so far and enjoying it. Anthony Minghella, the director of The English Patient who passed way recently (or “became late” in the argot of the novel) had just finished directing a movie based on the first novel in the series.
We spent most of Saturday taking a defensive driving course run by a comedian from the local Laugh Spot. I was taking it for insurance purposes. I leave any further inferences as to why we were both there to you. Six hours is a lot of time for a guy to be funny, but he did his best and it was tolerable. He had some genuinely hilarious moments, and some material he was obviously still developing.
We watched The Mist on Friday night. Not my wife’s usual fare, but the husband of one of her close friends had a small part in the film as Silas, one of the store employees who leaves with Brent Norton, and I had visited the set, so she withstood the creepy parts of the movie. On Friday we watched The Darjeeling Limited with Owen Wilson and Adrian Brody, with cameos by Bill Murray and Angelica Houston. Not a typical Owen Wilson movie, it tells the story of three estranged brothers who find themselves on a train in India trying to locate their mother. It’s ironic that Wilson’s character is recovering from a suicide attempt and Wilson himself was apparently doing the same thing at the movie’s premiere. It’s an odd little film, but we both enjoyed it. It has light humor—no slapstick—some tragedy, a lot of family baggage (symbolically jettisoned toward the end) and a good cast.
Yay for Natalie on Big Brother for not letting James hornswoggle her into an alliance. She made good choices for her nominees. At this point, though, I don’t care who wins. I don’t really like any of the remaining characters except Sharon, and even she gets on my nerves from time to time. I think she’s the smartest player left.
