Archive for May, 2012|Monthly archive page
Three to Get Deadly (Stephanie Plum, #3)
author: Janet Evanovich
name: Paul
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1997
rating: 3
read at: 2012/05/10
date added: 2012/05/10
shelves: mystery, novel
review:
Here we go again on another Stephanie Plum… well, I was going to say “mystery” but that isn’t really accurate, and I think I need to stop thinking of this series as a collection of mysteries, regardless of where they’re shelved in the bookstores. Let’s go with “caper” instead.
Janet Evanovich‘s half-awesome, half-bumbling heroine is back, this time tracking down a beloved neighborhood candy store owner who skipped bail after a gung-ho cop booked him for carrying a concealed weapon. Now Stephanie’s social circle is cross with her for sullying the reputation of a local saint and she still has to navigate her way through the parade of zany characters in her trademark falling-with-style panache. I’ve said in earlier reviews in the series that the plots aren’t really the point here, these ridiculously readable novels are much more at home giving backdrop to the fun predicaments and set pieces Evanovich likes to throw at her hapless protagonist.
I was happy to see that Grandma Mazur, a force in Two For The Dough steps back and Lula, the sassy hooker-turned-fileclerk gets sidekick billing this time around. We also get to learn more about Ranger and Morelli and Stephanie continue their funny series of near misses—or maybe more accurately near hits. Plum still has about as much luck with cars as with men, she’s witty and funny and likable as ever.
It’s going to get old if I keep reviewing each of these books with the same caveats, basically reiterating how breezy and silly and fun they are while offering very little in the way of substance. But it’s hard to have much more to say at this point. Three books in and we’re still in “establish the formula” territory, so I don’t expect much in the way of serious character development just yet. The questions I’m starting to ask are when is the formula going to wear thin for me? I suspect that if there isn’t a bit of evolution to Plum or the growing cast around her by about book five (High Five to be exact), my moderate enthusiasm for the series is going to wane. These are reasonably written, fast-paced, escapist reads but there is only so much repetition that a novel-reader should be asked to endure.
I have the next two on my to-read list already. I’m not sure that the review of Four To Score will have much more to say than this or the previous one had. But if I’m still giving three tepid, apologetic stars to these by book five, I think I’m going to have to take a break from the series (at least) so I don’t become an embodiment of insanity’s definition.
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Life Work
author: Donald Hall
name: Paul
average rating: 4.40
book published: 1993
rating: 3
read at: 2012/05/07
date added: 2012/05/08
shelves: memoir, non-fiction
review:
Let’s assume you were wondering if there was ever a market for blogging before the semi-coherent daily ramble became a legitimate form of communication ten or twelve years ago. To confirm this, you need look no further than Donald Hall‘s Life Work, a semi-topical serialized set of quasi-daily ruminations on the subject of work, self, life, death, family, history and the intersections of all the above. Written in the very early nineties, this book is a blog, regardless of whatever memoir title might be attached to it. The short essay formatting, the tangental discussions on a broad central theme; the only things missing are ironic hyperlinks and the occasional “sorry I haven’t posted in a while, I’ll be better soon, I promise!” entires.
I was assigned Life Work as a part of an English course I took during one of my failed attempts at college. This would be back in like 1996, when the web was just starting to be ubiquitous and when the notion of an online life was still mostly science fiction. In that time, which sounds quaint to describe and depresses me greatly to think of a time less than twenty years ago as such, the notion of a person spending an hour or more a day on actual post mail as opposed to email or Twitter or whatever was still current enough to not seem strange. Reading the book now, it kind of boggles my mind to know that something so central to communication when I was not even just a small child but a teenager, a near-adult, has all but been antiquated. Hall describes his work, his idealized day involving the anticipation of a day spent working on poems and essays and letters and books, then relaxing with his wife and attending to various chores come evening. He describes the workdays of his parents, his grandparents and great-grandparents. He talks about work in a general sense, he talks about it in great detail.
You can tell that Hall is a poet; his prose and essay stylings are peppered with dips into lyrical rhapsodies. He’s also kind of hard to like sometimes: he is stuffy and pretentious one moment and then grounded and rootsy the next. I kind of liked that he manages to convey the complexity of a real person by preserving the daily shift in tone and mood, in refusing the temptation to not edit down or smooth over these transitory notes. Still, there are a lot of points where Hall’s topic of work, as presented in this proto-blog format, become a kind of slushy non-thesis, weighed down by specifics that I don’t think anyone asked for.
Partway through the book, Hall deals with a health crisis, which puts a new spin on the topic (and a welcome one, though saying so sounds absolutely terrible I know), propelling the end of the book through with a renewed urgency that adds a nice edge to the languid tone of the first half. I did like that Hall kind of sold me (as if I needed selling) on the quiet life of the comfortable country writer; his depictions of an unhurried New England life ignited both my aspirational drive as well as some wanderlust to explore the semi-rural areas of Vermont and New Hampshire he creates in mental landscapes. Perhaps these places don’t or never did exist, but I’d like to go and see for myself.
And maybe, then, this is the final success of the book. In a collection of meandering essays about living and working, Hall has made me interested in doing both, doing more with each, and finding a happier junction where the two—inevitably, as Hall believes—meet.