Status Check

Finished: Good Omens (great!  highly recommended!)
Now Reading: Cat's Eye (by Atwood) - so far liking it but am early in.
Next Book: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - I'm kind of procrastinating on this one cause it's big and because people get "so much out of it" that I'm worried it will be a let-down.

Good Omens Review

This was my book on the plane and I sped through it instead of sleeping.  It is hilarious and dead-on for tone.  Even the small, side-characters are well developed & seem right out of Monty Python. One identifies with the central hellish & heavenly (former) inhabitants, and can recognize in the eleven-year-old AntiChrist the boy you raced bikes with around the neighborhood when you rode a 10-speed. And that doesn't even cover what they (it's co-authored) did to the poor Hound of Hell! I've already laughed out loud several times and can't seem to stop revisiting passages in my head. Angel Aziraphale & demon Crowley are awesome and there are things to learn as well - particularly in the remarkable critiques of modern music.

My only real complaint might be the four horsepersons of the Apocolypse. War (a.k.a. Carmen, a.k.a Scarlett, a.k.a. "Red Zuigiber", Pollution a.k.a. "Pale" a.k.a. Chalky a.k.a. "White" & Death (no nicknames required) are all fairly one-dimensional. My favorite of the four is definitely Famine a.k.a. Raven Sable a.k.a. "Black" - who's creative means of starving humanity with his famous trademarked unfood products are British cheek at its best. All in all, I'm enjoying where this is leading (and as the Apocolypse nears, I'm getting further & further sucked in)!

One of the witticisms early on;
"IT IS SAID THAT THE DEVIL HAS ALL THE BEST TUNES.
This is broadly true. But Heaven has all the best choreographers."

Voting for Sabbatical Books...

I've sent a voting e-mail to my bookclub friends plus other readers I know to help me pare down the 4 books I'll take on sabbatical (ouch!) Here are the options in alphabetical order (current leaders marked with an asterisk) with the brief descriptions that interested me.


All Other Nights by Dara Horn - her follow up to The World to Come (though not a sequel). About a Jewish family involved in spying, Passover and the Civil War across the Mason-Dixon line. And of course, there's a love story.

Bellwether by Connie Wills - I first read about this author in Book Lust (anthology of books for every mood by a Seattle librarian) in regards to To Say Nothing of the Dog (which I haven't read & perhaps should have included in the voting). It's my one real sci-fi book on the list about a chaos theorist and a sociologist who studies fads that are brought together by accident with mayhem ensuing. Lots of fun-poking at corporate environments and the similarities between humans and sheep.

**Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye - I liked her The Handmaid's Tale, I hated The Blind Assassin - so Margaret and I are tentative with each other. It's about how "girls" treat each other. Sort of a "Mean Girls" for grown-ups. Highly recommended by one of my friends as her favorite Atwood.

The Curious Incident of the Dog - by Mark Haddon. This has been a random interest for me due to browsing Borders display tables. It takes a young, autistic wanna-be Sherlock Holmes as the main character who is sleuthing to find the murderer of the neighbor's poodle to clear his name and who has to deal with the fact that other people are a total mystery to him and he has no understanding for sarcasm, nuances and subtlety.

Eva Luna by Isabelle Allende is a follow-up (though not a sequel) to her House of the Spirits which I have read and enjoyed. It fits into Latin America's "Magic Realism" genre like Paolo Coelho or Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Hundred Years of Solitude) & other Latin authors writing fictional dramas with fantasy bents.

**Good Omens by Terry Pratchette & Neil Gaiman - the world is supposed to end in Armegeddon in a few days but the main characters angel Aziraphale & demon Crowley haven't done the greatest jobs getting everything in place which might have to do with the fact that neither of them are that thrilled about the whole plan anyways. British humor.

**Zadie Smith's On Beauty - I really liked her previous book White Teeth about mixed families and coming-of-age in the U.K. This was the winner of the 2006 Orange Prize for fiction (whatever that is!) and contains similar themes this time in the U.S.

Geraldine Brook's The People of the Book - The fictional story of the travels of the 'Sarajevo Haggadah' a Jewish religious volume that travelled Europe surviving centuries of war and religious purges. Essentially a fly-on-the-wall story from a book's perspective.

The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay - probably the biggest tome of the bunch, this is the story of love and faith overcoming huge obstacles in South African apartheid. The main character Peekay is an English boy coming-of-age amidst Afrikaner hatred towards the English and Nazi sympathy during WWII. I've seen the movie and it was incredible (great music too!)

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield - a famous dying author who has told 19 versions of her history finally agrees to tell the truth to an unworldly, bookish biographer. The two women then discover a lot about each other, ghosts, and history as they figure out the truth in the story.

**The infamous Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - everyone's heard of it. Some folks have read it. Not me. It's been on my bookshelf for probably 4+ years.

My latest book to evangelize

I've managed to get my bookclub to pick this one up & everyone who does so can't put it down until they finish reading. The translation has been done very smoothly and the voice is crisp and enthralling. "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" by Stieg Larsson is amazingly accessible despite being a fairly dark tale with an originally foreboding Swedish title of "Man som hatar kvinnor" - "Men Who Hate Women." I wouldn't call this noir, its not your typical mystery or crime novel, but then I'm not sure what to call it; Let's just say there are incredibly drawn characters (both distant and recognizable), a fast-moving & surprising plot, and astute observations about corporations, humanity, economy, politics and love.

Two Books I'm Telling Everyone to Read

These haven't much to do with each other except that they both have amazing voices and subtly powerful stories of mystical quality. I've been telling (okay, haranguing and often forcing my own copies upon) everyone I know to read these two, and each time they stop answering phone calls, e-mails or smoke signals until they finish.

The first is Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie, a tiny book about two educated, city boys relocated to the backwoods of China as part of the Cultural Revolution. They stumble across a suitcase of illicit Western classics and come of age accompanied by nighttime readings of French literature and daytime attempts to woo the local beauty. The tale is so tiny and light it was over almost as soon as it started but along the way I realized the beautiful writing and very human tale had swept me up and I wasn't ready for it to end.

The second is a National Jewish Book Award winner I tripped over by accident at my beloved Powells Bookstore. The book is The World to Come by Dara Horn and the central family is introduced via the theft of a Chagall painting from the local Jewish Art Museum (security against bomb threats, little security for actual art) by a recently divorced man who remembers the painting from his childhood. I never dog-ear (shudder at the thought!) but I used receipts, notepad pages & ribbons to mark passages to read over and over again for the sheer pleasure of the lovely thought(s) (on love, family, death, rebirth) captured in a paragraph.

One such paragraph, "When twins are in the womb and one of them is born - the twin who remains behind watches his sole companion vanish and suffers an agony almost too devastating to bear. Only a moment later, he will understand that his twin has not died, but quite the opposite, that his vanished friend is closer to him than he can know. This, is also the way of real death and the world to come. Just because we think people have disappeared doesn't mean they have. They are closer than we think.

Sara was the younger Ziskind twin by a matter of minutes. But even before she heard this story, Sara had been aware of a silence within her bones, a residual sorrow that flowed quietly in her bood - the legacy of the ten minutes before her life began, when her twin brother left her behind. Those ten minutes also gave her something that few others had: a knowledge, a hard fact that she carried within her like a dark and polished stone, that people who were supposed to have disappeared really hadn't. She had seen Ben disappear and knew better. Vanished people were a breath away. One only needed to breathe."

In case you're not onhand to foist these books upon your persons, please be advised: YOU MUST READ THESE BOOKS - THEY ARE NOT TO BE MISSED!