I've had a succession of books come available that I'd been waiting for eagerly. Well, sort of eagerly. They were all books that sounded really cool and different and exciting when I read about them. As we all know, there are two ways this can go (that's total bullshit, there are a veritable multitude of ways this can go, but I'm bad at math and my husband is in Korea and there aren't enough iterations of me to effectively drive everywhere and cook everything and walk everything that needs to be driven and cooked and walked right now so I'm choosing to call it two, DO YOU WANT TO MAKE SOMETHING OF IT???); either the book lives up to its hype and you are transported and transformed for a few days and it stands in beautiful book memory as a memorable period, or it doesn't and you feel deceived, betrayed, cruelly mocked and desperate to throat-punch, nipple-twist and hair-pull the reviewer who set you off on this fool's errand. Or maybe that's just me.

Aliens! Galaxies! An enigmatic corporation (those almost always turn out to be evil). Dangerous illness! Typhoons, earthquakes, crumbling governments! Sounds earth-moving, does it not?
And... it's not that it was bad. It wasn't bad. It just was very.... earth-standing-still. What I said in my review was that it was very realistic, and some people like that. I'm forever coming out of movie theatres and hearing people complain that what we just saw "wasn't believable". Believability isn't really a relevant criterion in my book - it's fine if that's your thing, but if it's original and imaginative and funny or frightening or so sad you want to sit down and weep until you lose consciousness, put it up there, I WILL BELIEVE IT. This was almost too believable. It read like a documentary of these events if they'd actually taken place, which would be all I could reasonably expect if they HAD actually taken place, but since this was fiction, I would have appreciated more of a creative spark. What I got was this happened, and this happened, and this happened, and the aliens are weird and inscrutable, which is not that surprising really, being as they're aliens, and more stuff happened, much of it depressing and unpleasant, the end.

Which brings me to The Library at Mount Char. But now it's Tuesday, and I still can't find my keys, and my husband is still in Korea, and I haven't blogged for two weeks, and I almost got into the wrong car in a parking lot earlier, and I have to go cook something or order something or something. So hey, look, another book post where I don't actually review the book. That makes me charmingly quirky, right? I'll do it tomorrow. I promise. ("Was she a reliable blogger?" "Well, no.")
3 comments:
Hey you put it in the title. That's enough, right?
I am reading four books at once now (not counting books I'm reading with the kids), which is two too many for me. If I have more than two going at once I start to despair of ever making any progress in any of them. I wish I read as fast as you do.
Now I'm kind of afraid to recommend a book to you. ;-)
I feel the exact same way about believability. I'll believe it if it's awesome. Otherwise, you're exactly right--why write fiction about it?
I have Dept. of Speculation on my TBR list, and now I'l probably put it on hold at the library.
I once tried to get into my van in the parking lot, and the door would not open. The key was in my bag. I tried clicking it, everything, and OMG THERE IS SOMETHING WRONG WITH THE VAN WE ARE LOCKED OUT. Then Mark said "That doesn't look like our tire rims." He was right. It was the wrong van. My 11 year old noticed that the TIRES were different.
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