Plum tuckered

One of the books that I read this week is “Lean Mean Thirteen” by Janet Evanovich – I wanted something light and quick, and it was both.

I’ve read all of the numbered Stephanie Plum books, and they are very dependable.  Even though there isn’t any character growth; the plots between books are pretty much the same, just with different antagonists; and nothing is ever resolved between Stephanie and her brace of menfolk, I still enjoy reading them.  Evanovich can still make me laugh out loud, and she certainly has a way with dialogue.

I don’t mean to make it sound as if the books are poorly written – Evanovich is a good writer, and her plots are put together well – I don’t find myself jerked out of the story by unconvincing events, or by disconnected leaps or illogical actions.  In that sense, Evanovich triumphs in crafting her stories by making totally wild occurrences seem natural within the story – exploding taxidermy, anyone?

I think what I most enjoy is how everyone accepts the improbable events with barely a blink – this is part of what keeps the plot from exploding in disbelief.  I read somewhere that learning to make improv funny means learning to buy into the outrageousness that your partner feeds you, and vice versa – if you try to ground it in reality, it just becomes a crazy person talking to a sane person, which usually isn’t funny.  But two crazy people talking, now that’s a crack-up. . .

At any rate, the book was a fun read.  It certainly isn’t necessary to have read the first 12 Stephanie Plum books, but it might help if you have.  Otherwise, you’re being dropped into a whacked-out world totally unprepared for what you’re going to find.  On the other hand, maybe that would be a fun way to get to know Stephanie and her crew.

More infidelity

Sigh.

You would think that I could keep my eyes on the man in my life, that I wouldn’t be drawn by yet another adventurer, that I could remember that the argument between size and frequency has not been resolved.

But not only have I cheated, again, but I’m on my third infidelity of the week.

Don Quixote was my love, my life, for the first half of the story – my mantra for Part One of the book, in the words of Jessica Rabbit: “He makes me laugh”.

But with Part Two, the honeymoon was over.  Now I find myself avoiding him whenever I can – I go out with other books, while he stays home on the nightstand; even at home, I ignore him and flirt with graphic novels.

What is worse, I had a little fling with a female protagonist.  And it was fun, although it wasn’t a lasting relationship.

I wish I could say that it is because I’m acting out my grief, knowing that DQ is going to die – if it were only that, perhaps I could be forgiven.  But with less than 100 pages to go, there’s no denying the inevitable – and besides, I’ve been through too many deaths of beloved characters to use this as an excuse.

No, it is sheer selfishness, my tawdry little affairs; the lust for adventure and excitement; the desire to have someone new and unknown, perhaps even a little mysterious, in my life.

Dear DQ, part of me wants to lie to you, make you feel better, and even though it is trite, say, “It’s not you, it’s me.”

But it *IS* you.

Oddness

As I’ve been struggling through Don Quixote’s second half, I have breezed through a few other books. “Brother Odd” by Dean Koontz was one of the latest.

I absolutely loved the first two books about Odd Thomas. Odd is a very sweet, humble, loving character, and the stories managed to contain humor as well as thrill and suspense. The mix was right, and I was sucked right past the improbabilities into suspension of disbelief.

“Brother Odd” has an odd (pun intended) pace. Nothing really happens for the first half of the book – it’s all forebodings and maybe something’s happened, maybe not. Odd seems a little off, this time – still the same sweet, humble, loving character, but almost too much so. The relationship between Odd and the Russian seems rather contrived at first, although I think, overall, it was one of the best aspects of the book.

The first two books contain few, if any, supernatural elements other than those directly related to Odd and his abilities. This book is oriented around something that at least appears to be supernatural – magic is in the eyes of the beholder, and all we see at first is the completely different nature of the antagonists. Perhaps because of the lack of supernatural entities in the first two books, I had a harder time accepting them in this one. Even receiving the explanation for their presence in the end, it didn’t really work completely for me.

Yet, I enjoyed the book – it was still a good read, but certainly the weakest of the first three Odd Thomas novels.

Slow Going

I have been negligent in updating the blog, mostly due to the fact that I haven’t had a lot of time to read due to work pressures, and partly due to the fact that I’m *very* stuck in “Don Quixote”.

The first half of the book I took down in a week – for me, even that is slow reading (450 pgs in one week, compared to my normal monthly average of about 6200 pgs per month), but I was already starting to get swamped at work and I was coming down with a nasty cold, to boot.

But the first half was funny, compelling, and the interleaved stories that were not directly related to the story of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza added to the interest, rather than distracting me. In the second half (originally published somewhere around 12 years later), Cervantes whines about how readers of the first half complained about the interjected stories, and so in this half, he is only going to treat on the actual adventures of DQ & SP.

Sadly, although there is some good material in there, a lot of it is made up of long, didactic, even pedantic, monologues by DQ, setting forth his view of just about everything. A lot of the purported humor is lost, perhaps because of the gap of centuries between writing and reading; perhaps because even people reading at the time wouldn’t have gotten the humor; possibly because it was tailored more for the aristocratic audience of the day rather than the more plebian crowd; or maybe in spite of Cervantes’ intent, it just is not funny. He keeps telling the reader about how funny everything is – if it really were that funny, why does he have to keep reminding us? I don’t feel I can blame it on Edith Grossman, who did such a brilliant job translating on the first half – capturing the spirit and flow of a translation can’t be easy, and the first half was nearly seamless in terms of style and cohesion. I suspect that she did as beautiful a job on the second half, but unless you choose to alter the sense of what you’re translating to achieve a certain effect, you’re stuck with the original material and its flaws.

I’ve got about 100 pages to go, and it’s finally starting to pick up again. For the first half of the book, I was engaged and actively reading – the narrative gave me ideas to write on, made me think more about the context of the book’s time, location, and cultural setting, and the sub-text, as well as entertaining me; but very little in the first 350 pages of the second half has been more than just filler. Again, this may partially be due to my own circumstances, where my focus has been more on work than on what I’m reading; but I’ve been in similar circumstances before, and not had this much trouble with medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, or Victorian texts.

At this point, I feel committed to finishing the book, because I have high hopes for it to redeem itself, and bring back the enjoyment I had for the first half. However, in addition to the two books I read and wrote about already while I was working my way through DQ, I have read another two, quick reads that I will write about in later posts.