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Yesterday morning I finished reading Night of the Avenging Blowfish, by John Welter. It was a comedic book about love, spam, and baseball.
The book read pretty quickly until the last quarter or so, when I felt it bogged down. It was often funny, but generally shallow. Actually, the stuff about baseball and spam was funny but shallow; the stuff about love tended just to be shallow.
I find that comedy is extremely hard to write, and it's a rare comedic book that actually makes me giggle rather than roll my eyes (one of those rare exceptions being Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, which I should reread one of these days). Thus, while NotAB's comedy got old by the end of the book, and while the plotline about spam ended and the the plotline about baseball anticlimaxed about three-quarters of the way in, leaving us only with the dreary, tepid, Hollywoodesque love plot, I'd still rate it as a success. Some points early in the book were "have to read it out loud" funny.
I actually started on Night of the Avenging Blowfish after giving up on Beauty by Sheri Tepper. A pity. It was a well-written book and Tepper is much respected as a novelist ... but it just didn't keep my attention.
Beauty's problem, IMO, is that it kept constantly changing its background. It jumped from Faerie Tale Europe to dystopic future to an African jungle realm and in so doing constantly tossed our characters we'd come to know. It's just too easy to put a novel down and never pick it up again when you're starting from a fresh slate every 50 pages or so, and that's what I did.
Last night I started reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the fourth of the Potter books. I expect it to be, like the previous three, fairly mindless, mostly unoriginal brain candy, but a quick and fun read nonetheless. Rowling's writing has hugely improved since the first book, which felt pretty amateurish to me, so I'm looking forward to this one.
And I note Rowling's finally overcome her writer's block and submitted her fifth book, as of today. It's a third longer than the last massive tome, apparently. I'd be ecstatic if it were an Louise Erdrich, a Gene Wolfe, a Margaret Atwood, or a Connie Willis getting front-page news coverage. But really, having any writer get that sort of attention is amazing in a society that's so driven by mindless visual mediums.
The book read pretty quickly until the last quarter or so, when I felt it bogged down. It was often funny, but generally shallow. Actually, the stuff about baseball and spam was funny but shallow; the stuff about love tended just to be shallow.
I find that comedy is extremely hard to write, and it's a rare comedic book that actually makes me giggle rather than roll my eyes (one of those rare exceptions being Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, which I should reread one of these days). Thus, while NotAB's comedy got old by the end of the book, and while the plotline about spam ended and the the plotline about baseball anticlimaxed about three-quarters of the way in, leaving us only with the dreary, tepid, Hollywoodesque love plot, I'd still rate it as a success. Some points early in the book were "have to read it out loud" funny.
I actually started on Night of the Avenging Blowfish after giving up on Beauty by Sheri Tepper. A pity. It was a well-written book and Tepper is much respected as a novelist ... but it just didn't keep my attention.
Beauty's problem, IMO, is that it kept constantly changing its background. It jumped from Faerie Tale Europe to dystopic future to an African jungle realm and in so doing constantly tossed our characters we'd come to know. It's just too easy to put a novel down and never pick it up again when you're starting from a fresh slate every 50 pages or so, and that's what I did.
Last night I started reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the fourth of the Potter books. I expect it to be, like the previous three, fairly mindless, mostly unoriginal brain candy, but a quick and fun read nonetheless. Rowling's writing has hugely improved since the first book, which felt pretty amateurish to me, so I'm looking forward to this one.
And I note Rowling's finally overcome her writer's block and submitted her fifth book, as of today. It's a third longer than the last massive tome, apparently. I'd be ecstatic if it were an Louise Erdrich, a Gene Wolfe, a Margaret Atwood, or a Connie Willis getting front-page news coverage. But really, having any writer get that sort of attention is amazing in a society that's so driven by mindless visual mediums.
