Thursday, July 17, 2008

Is This Thing On?

Hello, virtual bibliobots. I have been too busy reading to spend any time typing. Like, menus and such. The yellow pages. And Don DeLillo.

I was reading "Underground" for some time. This book is massive. Go ahead, measure it. Weigh it. I am not lying. The usual hallmarks of a good read, for this amateur reader, were evident. I wanted to know what was happening, or going to happen, to the characters.* Plus: lofty prose, rapturous passages, olfactory hallucinations. The good stuff. I would recommend this book to friends I expect to see again.

Whereas "Mao II" is pissing me off. So much so I don't care where my prepositions are found in. Or on! That's right. I want everyone in the book to perish so someone interesting or worthy of further interest can arise. Right now the anti-hero, or protagonist, or whatever it is is in Athens waiting to meet a terrorist, or accountant, or something and likely something bad will happen to him. Or not. Who cares? I don't care. I put the book in my closet and I am now reading something crappy but mildly funny** until the next massive book crawls into my field of vision and refuses to leave until it is done with me.

Or maybe I should haul Mao II from the closet and wait for the cultural revolution. I don't know if it's worth the effort. Do you?

PMO

* Mostly nothing. Or they'd disappear. Don DeLillo has eaten the Texas Highway Killer.
** Morgan Spurlock in search of public enema #1.

1 comment:

palinode said...

I couldn't stand Mao II. I tried, repeatedly, like an insect trying to crawl out of a pitcher plant, to escape the sticky plot of that novel. No luck. It drowned me.