So, for the new feature on the blog, I present to you: ASHLEY'S BATHROOM READING!!!!
What's this? you might ask. Well, it's basically like a book review, but subtly different. I read a lot, and I don't have a lot of time, so one of the best places for me to read is in the bathroom. Theoretically. Usually I just end up starting reading while I'm brushing my teeth or drying my hair or . . . whatever . . . and wander out of the bathroom, book in hand. And then I waste hours on the couch reading my "bathroom book". BUT THE PRINCIPLE REMAINS UNCHANGED. Typically I like books that are light, entertaining, and can be read in short snatches without losing the thread of the story.
The other unique thing about books I choose for this is that I give myself permission to stop reading them if I don't like them. It's my equivalent of a Friday Night Kill Spot on TV - if a book gets downgraded to Bathroom Reading from regular reading, I'm thinking about kicking it. On the other hand, some bathroom books I've absolutely LOVED (Good Omens was a recent bathroom book, true facts, and I'm totally obsessed with that book). So just because a book hits this category doesn't mean I disliked it, or was lukewarm toward it.
Anyway, the first book in this installment is: Fool by Christopher Moore!
Chris would be honored by this, I'm pretty sure. Anyway, I do love Christopher Moore, but I really could not get in to Fool the first time I read it, when it was first published. So I let it hang out for a few years and just now tried to pick it up again. Frequently books like this become bathroom books - if I still don't like them, I just stop again and end up donating them to a local library.
Happily, this was not the case with my second attempt at Fool. The book is not for everyone - it's vulgar, it's dark, it's smutty and it's sacrilegious to the work of Shakespeare, but my goodness is it hilarious. The book basically takes place during Shakespeare's 'King Lear', but it's re-told from the point of view of the faithful, trusty court jester, Pocket.
Pocket is the kind of hero I can really get behind, and by that I mean he is pretty much a villainous, traitorous anti-hero. You get to watch as Pocket goes from relative complacency (with a dash of mild worry about Lear's sanity) to heartbroken vindictiveness, to absolute outraged fury, to, once again, happy complacency. I do absolutely love characters like this - TVTropes refers to them as Magnificent Bastards, and the name is so very rightly earned in Pocket's case. Because he's magnificent, oh yes, and a total bastard.
I'm sure Shakespeare didn't really consider that Lear's fool might be a conniving, passively homicidal man who carries daggers around with him, but nevertheless Moore pulls it off well enough to be funny, if not totally convincing. It did occur to me while I was reading that Fool sort of felt like, and could be perceived as, an attempt to recapture the same glory he got with Lamb: take a well-known, "sacred" work and put your own off-color flare on it and let it run. Lamb pulled it off gorgeously; no, I wasn't convinced that Jesus really had a best friend named Biff that ran around with him on fabulous adventures, but I laughed and I appreciated the New Testament more after reading that book, rather than losing my faith or being offended or what have you. Fool, I think, does try to do this again, but it's less successful. I certainly didn't gain a new appreciation for the message or the story of 'King Lear', and if I were to go to a performance I don't think I'd have a greater appreciation of that either. Sure, I loved the book and thought it was funny, but the book doesn't add anything to 'Lear', and it doesn't increase your awareness of some of the more appreciable aspects of the play. Where Lamb was all at once funny, touching, tragic and thoughtful, Fool only really manages to capture the funny and the tragic - it makes up for the touching and the thoughtful with vulgarity and sexiness, which is not necessarily less enjoyable, but certainly doesn't give the reader the same experience.
I did have a few issues with the speech - Moore tried to blend colloquial American English and British English with Olde English and I actually think the book might have suffered for it. The British phrases were subtitled, which lent more of an awkward and stilted feeling to the use, and overall the dialogue ended up feeling like an uncomfortable jumble when he tried too hard to incorporate the "local flavor" elements. To put it another way, I had a very hard time "hearing" the characters speak when these turns of phrase were thrown around - they seemed garbled and off-mark. It's not a big issue, and it is absolutely not enough to turn me off of the book, but it did grate a little.
That said, I loved the pacing of the book. I have the worst time with pacing, as an author, and Moore really pulled it off well. Seriously, I'm considering studying the man on this: we all have something to learn from every book, and by God if I learn how to pace my books better and handle the passage of time more gracefully that will not be the worst thing that could happen. He handled the action so that it didn't seem rushed or too fast, but it didn't drag either. The plot sidelines were balanced nicely with actual plot elements to provide relief from the otherwise heavy story, without overwhelming the story and distracting me. And, this being a book I read in short snatches rather than longer sessions, I was able to keep up with the story without losing track of it - here and there I had to read a few pages over again to clear up something I was confused about, or felt I'd missed, but overall I could pick it up and put it down as I pleased without it being too complicated.
Final Thoughts?: Fool was generally a really good book. I does try a little too hard, I think, to recapture the recipe of Lamb, and the dialogue gets uncomfortable at times, but overall these issues are small and do not take away from the actual fun entertainment the book provides. And since it's a humorous fiction work, well, fun entertainment is the name of the game, isn't it? So well done, Christopher Moore: I tip my hat to you once again, and all your profane and hilarious glory. Keep 'em coming, 'cause I'm out now.
Showing posts with label book reviews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label book reviews. Show all posts
Saturday, July 9, 2011
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Book Review: Treasure Island
Holy crap two days in a row! Nah, j/k there's not a lot to talk about for me BUT we have our very first installment in my hopefully-ongoing series of book reviews! And today we are going to look fondly back at my very first reading (at 23 years old) of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island.
In short, I thought the book was really really brilliant. I know it's a kids' book, or supposed to be, but honestly I'm not sure I would have really been able to hang with it when I was the same age as the narrator, Jim. Not because it's dense or complicated but because the jargon and language used would have been over my head. Maybe when I got to be around 15 or so.
Speaking of which, how old is Jim? I thought he was around 13 or 14, but then some of the stuff he did made me think he was maybe older. I don't know, it didn't really get in the way of my enjoyment of the book at all but I still wondered about it.
Anyway, aside from the language issues I would have no qualms about giving this book to a room full of middle schoolers. It's fun, it's a great adventure, and it has exactly the kind of hero that I like: a clever one. Too often these days our heroes get by on the shoulders of their friends (I'm looking at you, Harry Potter) or because they're bigger and stronger than anyone else. What happened to the clever heroes like Jim Hawkins? I miss them. Jim was also kind of a delightful smartass - abandoning the captain, the doctor and the squire to fend for themselves while he scurried off to do what he thought would be helpful was both brash, truant and brave. If it had gone wrong I would have been furious at him, and I think Jim would have been furious with himself (if he'd lived) but as it was it gave him the chance to really be brilliant all by himself, and to sort of save the day. The fact that the others recognized that, too, was a wonderful part of the book.
I also just enjoyed the setting of the book. I've always loved pirates, sailing, being on the ocean, etc. An interesting fact about my family is that back in the early 19th century, most of my mother's side of the family were involved in the business of piracy in some way or another, and while it's not honorable or glamorous it's a part of the family lore that's been passed down. I think a lot of my love of the ocean and nautical tales comes from the fact that my family has that tradition of being of the more nautical persuasion, even to this day. Boating is just a thing we do. I spent a lot of time when I was younger on my grandfather's Grady-White, and some of my fondest memories are from that period of time. So books about the ocean (and Jimmy Buffet songs, yes) always hold a special place in my heart. Just reading about Jim's time at sea, on the Hispaniola, and sailing her, made me all nostalgic and gave me the warm fuzzies inside. So admittedly I may have been biased from the start; I am not a good objective judge of books about pirates/sailing.
Much of Treasure Island's charm, though, comes from the story itself; the setting and the characters just make the whole experience all the richer. You have the clever, plucky hero who it honest and practical, and manages to come across something of incredible value. You are just as boyishly excited about the whole hunt as the main characters, and your distrust of Long John and the crewmen descends totally into despair as the mutiny comes around. Admittedly, I did know a great deal of the story before I even started, thanks to the Muppets, but really there is no comparison between the book and the movie. I love them both, yes, but the book was just incredible.
So yes, in conclusion, I really recommend Treasure Island, without any kind of hesitation at all. I only wish I'd heard more of what happened to Jim after the story was over, what he did with his share, but that wasn't really part of the story, I guess. I would think it sort of was, but alas.
And that concludes my first book review! Next in line is The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches us About what it Means to be Alive. Stay tuned!
In short, I thought the book was really really brilliant. I know it's a kids' book, or supposed to be, but honestly I'm not sure I would have really been able to hang with it when I was the same age as the narrator, Jim. Not because it's dense or complicated but because the jargon and language used would have been over my head. Maybe when I got to be around 15 or so.
Speaking of which, how old is Jim? I thought he was around 13 or 14, but then some of the stuff he did made me think he was maybe older. I don't know, it didn't really get in the way of my enjoyment of the book at all but I still wondered about it.
Anyway, aside from the language issues I would have no qualms about giving this book to a room full of middle schoolers. It's fun, it's a great adventure, and it has exactly the kind of hero that I like: a clever one. Too often these days our heroes get by on the shoulders of their friends (I'm looking at you, Harry Potter) or because they're bigger and stronger than anyone else. What happened to the clever heroes like Jim Hawkins? I miss them. Jim was also kind of a delightful smartass - abandoning the captain, the doctor and the squire to fend for themselves while he scurried off to do what he thought would be helpful was both brash, truant and brave. If it had gone wrong I would have been furious at him, and I think Jim would have been furious with himself (if he'd lived) but as it was it gave him the chance to really be brilliant all by himself, and to sort of save the day. The fact that the others recognized that, too, was a wonderful part of the book.
I also just enjoyed the setting of the book. I've always loved pirates, sailing, being on the ocean, etc. An interesting fact about my family is that back in the early 19th century, most of my mother's side of the family were involved in the business of piracy in some way or another, and while it's not honorable or glamorous it's a part of the family lore that's been passed down. I think a lot of my love of the ocean and nautical tales comes from the fact that my family has that tradition of being of the more nautical persuasion, even to this day. Boating is just a thing we do. I spent a lot of time when I was younger on my grandfather's Grady-White, and some of my fondest memories are from that period of time. So books about the ocean (and Jimmy Buffet songs, yes) always hold a special place in my heart. Just reading about Jim's time at sea, on the Hispaniola, and sailing her, made me all nostalgic and gave me the warm fuzzies inside. So admittedly I may have been biased from the start; I am not a good objective judge of books about pirates/sailing.
Much of Treasure Island's charm, though, comes from the story itself; the setting and the characters just make the whole experience all the richer. You have the clever, plucky hero who it honest and practical, and manages to come across something of incredible value. You are just as boyishly excited about the whole hunt as the main characters, and your distrust of Long John and the crewmen descends totally into despair as the mutiny comes around. Admittedly, I did know a great deal of the story before I even started, thanks to the Muppets, but really there is no comparison between the book and the movie. I love them both, yes, but the book was just incredible.
So yes, in conclusion, I really recommend Treasure Island, without any kind of hesitation at all. I only wish I'd heard more of what happened to Jim after the story was over, what he did with his share, but that wasn't really part of the story, I guess. I would think it sort of was, but alas.
And that concludes my first book review! Next in line is The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches us About what it Means to be Alive. Stay tuned!
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