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| This book will kill you.
Then it will bring you back to life.
And kill you again.
The sense of place-ness and an economical prose seem incongrous with the epic yet bizarre happenings. It twists you like a rag. It bleeds you.
4.25 (blueberry) muffins out of 5.
~Miri Kim~ | | |
| You can't put this book down, but sometimes that's not always a good thing.
But great scenes of Chicago, where the gray never seems to quite lift.
3.5 (stale) muffins out of 5. | | |
| There's a lot of horrific, nonreflective travel writing out there. I
like to call these perpetrators as "explornographers." But just as I
was about to give up Mongolia travel writing for good, I stumble upon
(ok, not really, Mongolia's section is only one Fondren shelf long
compared to several aisles on China) Jasper Becker's "Lost Country:
Mongolia Revealed." Forgive the guy for imposing gender connotations
upon the lame and sensationalist title, for the book is a great read
and written with great consideration for Mongolia's ethnic and
religious minorities. He also evades (albeit imperfectly) the trap of
Genghis Khan, and dedicates only a chapter to this figure who seems to
represent, unfortunately, the entire cultural psyche of Mongolia.
Modern and contemporary Mongolian history surface frequently, all the
more to the writer's credit. Now if only I could find my way over
there...
4 Muffins out of 5 Muffins.
Miri Kim
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| These are my favorite lines from this book:
We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can
neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives
to come. (7)
When a society is rich, its people don't need to work with their hands;
they can devote themselves to activities of the spirit. We have
more and more universities and more and more students. If
students are going to earn degrees, they've got to come up with
dissertation topics. And since dissertation topics can be written
about everything under the sun, the number of topics is infinite.
Sheets of paper covered with words pile up in archives sadder than
cemeteries, because no one ever visits them, not even on All Souls
Day. Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of
words, in the madness of quantity. (101)
But, he said to himself, whether they knew or didn't know is not the
main issue, the main issue is whether a man is innocent because he
didn't know. Is a fool on the throne relieved of all
responsibility merely because he is a fool? (172)
People derived too much pleasure from seeing their fellow man morally
humiliated to spoil that pleasure by hearing out an explanation.
(188)
Here he was, doing things he didn't care a damn about, and enjoying
it. Now he understood what made people (people he always pitied)
happy when they took a job without feeling the compulsion of an
internal "Es muss sein!" and forget it the moment they left for home
every evening. This was the first time he had felt that blissful
indifference. (193)
As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of
woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing
in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one
else has discovered or said something essential about. But isn't
it true that an author can write only about himself? (218)
How did the senator know that children meant happiness? Could he
see into their souls? What if, the moment they were out of sight,
three of them jumped the fourth and began beating him up? (248)
When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. (248)
Overall, 3.5  out of . | | |
| Amazon.com review
Mark Haddon's bitterly funny debut novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,
is a murder mystery of sorts--one told by an autistic version of Adrian
Mole. Fifteen-year-old Christopher John Francis Boone is mathematically
gifted and socially hopeless, raised in a working-class home by parents
who can barely cope with their child's quirks. He takes everything that
he sees (or is told) at face value, and is unable to sort out the
strange behavior of his elders and peers.
Late one night,
Christopher comes across his neighbor's poodle, Wellington, impaled on
a garden fork. Wellington's owner finds him cradling her dead dog in
his arms, and has him arrested. After spending a night in jail,
Christopher resolves--against the objection of his father and
neighbors--to discover just who has murdered Wellington. He is
encouraged by Siobhan, a social worker at his school, to write a book
about his investigations, and the result--quirkily illustrated, with
each chapter given its own prime number--is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
Haddon's novel is a startling performance. This is the sort of book
that could turn condescending, or exploitative, or overly sentimental,
or grossly tasteless very easily, but Haddon navigates those dangers
with a sureness of touch that is extremely rare among first-time
novelists. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is original, clever, and genuinely moving: this one is a must-read. --Jack Illingworth, Amazon.ca
My review
The story reminded me (and Rose) of Daniel Keye's Flowers for Algernon, but not as impactful. An easy read, good for short trips and school breaks.
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