Reading Recommendations and/or Reviews

Alex · 05-10-2007, 06:52 PM

Combined with my new commute and a return to fiction I've been blowing through several books a week.

The two recent more literary ones are:

Deliverance by James Dickie. The novel on which the movie was based. The phrase "squeal like a pig" does not appear in the book (though the scene does) but it is interesting to see how it changes. I haven't seen the movie in quite a while but I came away from it with a very different mood than from the book.

The Geographer's Library. Another one of those "the present connecting to some episode in the past" books that seem to be all the range. See also The Illusionist in which a contemporary man learns of his magician ancestors startling history. Or The Historian in which a scholar learns of troubling connections between her life and Vlad the Impaler. They all end up feeling a bit too gimmicky. A different version of needing a white hero in an Africa movie; apparently we need a modern protagonist in a historical novel. Also felt echoes of The Club Dumas (made into the atroticious The Ninth Gate with Johnny Depp). If you've read any of those and really liked them then you'll probably go for this one. But I liked those others as well and just am feeling kind of bored with the story telling methodology.

05-10-2007, 06:52 PM	#5
Alex . Join Date: Feb 2005 Posts: 13,354	Combined with my new commute and a return to fiction I've been blowing through several books a week. The two recent more literary ones are: Deliverance by James Dickie. The novel on which the movie was based. The phrase "squeal like a pig" does not appear in the book (though the scene does) but it is interesting to see how it changes. I haven't seen the movie in quite a while but I came away from it with a very different mood than from the book. The Geographer's Library. Another one of those "the present connecting to some episode in the past" books that seem to be all the range. See also The Illusionist in which a contemporary man learns of his magician ancestors startling history. Or The Historian in which a scholar learns of troubling connections between her life and Vlad the Impaler. They all end up feeling a bit too gimmicky. A different version of needing a white hero in an Africa movie; apparently we need a modern protagonist in a historical novel. Also felt echoes of The Club Dumas (made into the atroticious The Ninth Gate with Johnny Depp). If you've read any of those and really liked them then you'll probably go for this one. But I liked those others as well and just am feeling kind of bored with the story telling methodology.
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