Monday, September 29, 2008

Recently finished

I just finished Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers. I'm not sure what I think of the book, it was definately different. Good writer, odd premise. Half biographical memoir, half fictional story, it placed the author in a fictional story through which during the course of events he was able to reflect on the previous 15 years of his life. It all pulls together, sort of, in the end, that is if you're like me and you like to pull all sorts of crazy meanings out of books that the authors may or may not have intended (although I'm inclined to believe writers hide far more of that stuff in their intentionally than we might think).

It's not the sort of book i'd recommend to everyone, or in fact manyones. You'd have to be the sort of person who likes the sort of novels you'd read in a literary course for english majors in some pretentious private college. If you like those, or you like the sort of novels that you can write papers about, you might like this one.

It was way heavy. Not weight-wise, but it took me quite awhile to trudge through the 326 pages. I'd suspect that it will take me half that time to read the 400+ pages of my next book, Sons of the Oak, a pulp fantasy sequel to a series i've liked on-and-off for the past couple years. After that, I either go to the short story book by Susanna Clarke (who wrote the best fantasy novel of the past many years in Jonathon Strange and Mr. Norrell) or back to the heaviness with more Garcia-Marquez (Love in the Time of Cholera). we'll see. maybe something else will catch my eyes between now and then.

1 comment:

Jackson said...

Hey Nate, I just found this, I didn't know you'd switched over to blogspot. Subscribed.

You may have done this on purpose, but it's absence, not absense. Every time I start up my browser I check my subscribed feeds, and "absense" will sit there, staring at me.