I've been busy lately, too busy during the weeks to collect blog-snippets, instead barely cranking out one post per day (if that), and waaaaay too busy on Saturdays to compose anything from scratch and post from home. But while it may be irregular, the ol' SGB is bound to pop up every once in a while.
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So I belong to a website that lets you track books you've read and sort them into shelves and post reviews and follow other people. Book nerd social networking, more or less. Anyway, I recently read the book Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, which I didn't post about here because there really wasn't much I felt I could say about it. I mean, it's a pretty genius novel, incredibly affecting and dazzlingly well-written. But I had to post at least a brief review on the tracking website, and in that review I mentioned that I was late to the party in reading Middlesex, because for a while there it was one of those books everyone was reading and that always makes me a little leery. I offered two other books as examples of that type of damningly uber-popular work, two books which I haven't read and probably never will read: The Lovely Bones and The DaVinci Code. Then I said I loved Middlesex and understood why it was so universally regarded, and posted my review.
On the next screen, the website offered some quick recommendations, as always, based on "People who read Middlesex also read ..." I SWEAR TO FRIGGA these were the top five books:
The Time Traveler's Wife
by Audrey Niffenegger
The Lovely Bones
by Alice Sebold
The Kite Runner
by Khaled Hosseini
The Da Vinci Code
by Dan Brown
Water for Elephants
by Sara Gruen
Notice Lovely Bones and DaVinci Code are of course on the list. And are those other three just as exemplary as archetypes of my "suspiciously ubiquitous" category? Yes, yes they are. The difference is, I've already read The Time Traveler's Wife, the Kite Runner, and Water For Elephants. The Kite Runner was a bit underwhelming, but the other two were really good. Still, it was just bizarre to be so squarely in line with that list, four out of six (including Middlesex) under my belt. This is probably the most caught up on contempo lit I've been in over a decade.
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Speaking of books a lot of people have read, I am really keen on the idea of reading Moneyball this season. I think I'll have to see if they have a copy at the library or the used book store. It's just one of those baseball classics that I hear about all the time and still haven't taken the time to read, but the corrective urge is getting pretty powerful. And since the Yankees are defending World Champions again this season, and will have the highest payroll again this season, I have no doubt the (snidely disparaging) references to Moneyball will be flying fast and furious, and I want to go straight to the source. And soon - two weeks 'til Opening Night! Woooo!
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And speaking of books I am currently reading (were we? we are now!), I am working my way through Under the Dome in my spare time. I collect Stephen King hardcovers and this one is over 900 pages and thus a bit too cumbersome to carry on the Metro every day. So I read other stuff while I commute and UTD when I have free time at home, which is not all that often. This creates a nearly unbearable reading experience. UTD is a horror novel in the sense that the things that happen during the plot are horrible, and sometimes horrifying. There are no vampires or werewolves or reanimated corpses; all the monsters are human beings showing their worst nature when their town is isolated under an inescapable, otherworldly dome. The few decent people in the town are slowly being made to suffer excruciatingly at the hands of the morally corrupt power structure that emerges in the crisis. And because I'm going through the book at a snail's crawl, I'm drawing out the suffering and feel like I'll never get to the good guys' salvation and the bad guys' comeuppance. Sometimes I'll be sitting around feeling generally nervous and worried and can't figure out why, and then I realize it's because I don't know what the ultimate fate of a fictional character is going to be and the anxiety has been building for weeks. It's a strange sensation.
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