No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

I couldn't finish it and I'm not happy about it.

I can't state exactly where I gave up since I kept trying and frankly I've seen the movie and it's such a perfect replica of the book that the two have grown together in my mind like conjoined twins.

I could say a really good movie ruined a really good book, but everything else being equal I could have kept reading except for two stylistic idiosyncracies: fragments and a lack of quotation marks. I know, I know it's McCarthy's style to say: "In the compressed air motes and heat distortion. A low haze of shimmering dust and pollen." I get it--it's an oral tale and Sheriff's Bell narration works just fine, but those sections are in italics, a clear signal that this is a different mode. But in the end this is a book, it is print, it is text. Read it outloud to me and I'll listen to the end. I just can't read it.

Image from Vintange International
Random House and Paramount

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

Why did I pick up this book? The intriguing title and the cover. (I always judge a book by its cover.)

Why did I keep reading this book? Talking cats, Colonel Sanders as a pimp, characters that converse about philosophy, music, history and literature in a warm and believable manner. An existential mystery both poignant and funny wrapped in and around a love story. Delicious.

(Vintage international image.)

Books I will try to read AGAIN

Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
Dune by Frank Herbert

Nausea by Sartre

I once had an old paperback of Sartre’s Nausea and I still remember the cover image of a young man holding his stomach and grimacing—that’s the feeling I get whenever I think of meaningful novels or the danger of fictionalizing my own stories or even changing the names of people in a memoir. I hang on to facts like death clings to life.

---

Cover of the 1964 English edition of Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea, 7^th printing; New Directions Publishing.

Comes a Horseman by Robert Liparulo

Stopped at page 136; the exact line, "I saw you glowing like the Madonna, mi amore!"

I decided to read this book because my daughter is writing a fantasy/thriller and she bought two Liparulo paperbacks to get a feel for the type of book selling right now.

The opening line is, "He waited with his face pressed against the warm metal and his pistol gouging the skin at his lower back." Oh yeah, I love that: sensual, concrete, in media res. The plot ripped along, the mystery beckoned, the writing style seductive, the narration -a swig of dark ale, but a hint of a possible romance between two of the characters threatened the entire experience-like trying to enjoy a ripe peach with a rotten core.

My Life in France by Julia Child

Stopped at page 56. The exact line that stopped me? "I found it all deeply fascinating."

I picked up this book because I had just come back from a month-long trip to France. In addition, I am interested in French Baking. And yet, the minute Julia said, " I found it all deeply fascinating", I thought, "No, it's not."
Julia Child could be excused for this line because it is a biography; she's telling us how she felt. Showing is better than telling but she is a cook not an author so I should cut her some slack, but I can't get past the "deeply fascinating." Maybe if she'd left out the "deeply".

Against Nature (A book I finished.)

Have you ever been to someone's house that was perfectly clean and still you felt so creeped out by the ambiance you couldn't eat there or use their toilet?