After my horrible blogging record for the month of July, I've made a promise to myself to blog more during the month of August. Of course, now that I've typed out those words, I realized that I'll be on vacation for eight days during the month (and presumably completely off the web, since we'll be staying in a rental cabin in the ginormous metropolis of Driggs, Idaho) as well as starting my grad school coursework. What can I say, people? I'll do the best I can with the resources I've got. If I can log onto a web connection during the ol' va-cay, I will. And I suspect that I'll be willing to take any excuse to take a break from the new studying routine, so it's probable that I will blog more.
In the meantime, some housekeeping...
Books I've read during The Great Blog Blackout of 2008:
The Wentworths by Katie Arnoldi (a bookclub selection) I guess my reaction to this one would have to be a resounding "meh"*. Arnoldi has crafted a satire of Southern California culture using one wealthy family as a stand-in for the entirety of a rich, vacuous, lost society. Reviewers praised its laugh out loud humor, but it must have been lost on my unsophisticated middle-American outlook. It wasn't badly written, just ultimately unsatisfying. Reading it was a little like eating a meal consisting entirely of marshmallows. It starts out great but leaves you feeling bloated and irritable.
Origin: A Novel by Diana Abu-Jaber loved it! I couldn't put this one down. It was a loaner from a friend of mine and I ripped right through it in about a day. The author said that she set out to write a "literary" mystery/suspense genre novel and I think she succeeded. What could have been another overwrought forensic whodunnit (babies have been dying from what might be muder or simply SIDS) was made fresh with the inclusion of an intriguing main character and an amazing subplot. Kept me guessing until the very end.
* Meh (according to the Urban Dictionary) - a word that conveys "indifference; to be used when one simply does not care" or "the verbal equivalent of a shrug of the shoulders".
Don't let it be said that I'm not teaching you all things!
1 comment:
Oh, you weren't crazy about The Wentworths either? After I read all of those reviews I thought there was something wrong with me...but I feel better knowing you had the meh feeling, too. --Bon
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