Friday, July 08, 2011

currently reading

Finally, I have finished Freedom, Jonathan Franzen's overly long novel of an epically dysfunctional family. I am relieved to have that monkey off my back. I started reading Freedom on the September day it was published, and I paid full price. For the most part, I found the characters ugly and nearly nonredeemable. I was never sure where the story was going, and yet found myself blown away that Franzen could pull off nearly 600 pages of dense writing, moving his novel along at a snail's pace and that it would be a bestseller and critically acclaimed. Baffling. BTW, I adored The Corrections.

Still working on Ben Aaronovitch's
Midnight Riot, which is the first mystery in a funny supernatural series. I haven't read much in this subgenre, so I may not be the best judge, but I do think it's super fun and has been the perfect anecdote to bloated literary fiction.

We took another trip to SoDak over the July 4th weekend and so had another opportunity for a read-aloud--
Born to Run by Christopher McDougall, the story of ultra-marathon runners and the Tarahumara, a super secret Mexican tribe of ultrarunners. We're enjoying the book. The author is a sports journalist and the writing is easy-going.

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