June 2005

Local author's book for review.

Saturday, by Ian McEwan
Wow, I loved this. Astonishing, actually -- I haven't read a book in a long time that felt this important and relevant. It's the story of one day (a Saturday, dur) in the life of a British brain surgeon, but it's really a story with coming to grips with the larger narrative of your life. The protagonist experiences a sort of indirect act of violence at the scene of an Iraq war protest, and then experiences a very direct act of violence afterward. Ideologies are behind everything, though, and just one of this things the book does amazingly well is presenting both moral sides of the war without being at all moralizing. Fabulous. Grade: A+.

Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld
Anything coming on the heels of "The Wonder Spot" was going to have problems, but now my opinion of this book is also compounded by the fact that the author wrote a somewhat nasty review of "The Wonder Spot" itself -- it's making me like it less. On its own, I thought "Prep" was good, enjoyable, a quick read with an interesting main character, but not necessarily worthy of the flood of media attention it's attracted. I don't get it. It's not revelatory or controversial... seemed to me like a tamer and eminently more enjoyable version of the evil Charlotte Simmons. And none of this is to say I didn't like the book, because I did (I read the last third of it in the car on the way to and from my cousin's graduation party, and didn't really want to stop to get out of the car). The narrator was an sympathetic, complicated character, but she seemed to make some really inconsistent, illogical choices sometimes, which bothered me. Readable, but not, like, astonishing. Grade: B, I guess, but it's complicated.