I probably should have added this as part of my blog title, as in "Random Reading and Idiosyncratic Reviews" because, not only is my reading all over the place, but my reactions to books and, therefore, what I write about them are often different from the acceptable body of criticism. Take Amy Tan for example. This is an author whose books consistently get critical acclaim and yet, after this second attempt at reading one of her works, I won't give it another go because she just doesn't offer enough to make me take time away from other options. I acknowledge that she writes well and in the book I just read, Saving Fish From Drowning, she taught me things about the culture of China and Myanmar, and created quirky yet believable characters. And I even get the message about the messy consequences of well-intentioned actions (a former colleague used to say the road to hell was paved with them). But as with an earlier book I wrote about here that I didn't even finish, Dingley Falls, none of the characters so engaged me that I actually cared about what happened to them.
Then last night I finished Tracks by Louis Erdrich--again a second-time attempt to read an author who consistently gets good critical response. I love reading about other cultures but these characters were opaque, so outside my range of experience (not a bad thing necessarily) and with so little that I could connect to in terms of understanding their behavior, that I found myself merely curious but not attached.
This distresses me. I get books recommended by people whose minds I tremendously respect, and /or that are written by quality authors and then I 'm disappointed. I don't dislike them; I mildly enjoyed both Tracks and Saving Fish. BUT I'm not wild about them, and as Nancy Pearl always says, there are too many books... I should in fact follow NP's "Rule of 50" when I run into such books but I just can't let them go because of who gives them to me and who wrote them, and I keep thinking, surely this will get better.
On the bright side, I was looking over NP's fairly recent reviews of "Great Sci-Fi and Fantasy" and found a couple of pleasant surprises. She really likes Guy Gavriel Kay, the author of the book I most recently wrote about, AND she labelled Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson one of her "top 10 favorite books of all time"--high praise indeed! I read this book quite by accident when someone left it at a condo I was staying in on vacation last year and was totally drawn into his complex tale spanning several decades and continents. Go see NP's review for this one. This was the opposite experience. I'd never heard of Stephenson or the book and had a great read so it was a totally unanticipated delight.
Anyway, the moral of the story is, you just can't count on anyone to lead you to what may be a personally satisfying read, including me. But I love writing about what I read!
