It still feels like I am reading slowly. That is not necessarily a bad thing. I don't yet know if it is a good thing.
I finished five books in November; none of them were difficult. One was a cookbook. I was looking for a recipe. I found it in Marcella's Italian Kitchen, which I checked out of the library. The recipe, for a fruit sorbet, helped clarify my thoughts on the use of acids to bring out the flavors of fruits. Then I spent some time perusing the book, which was fun, but more like a trip down memory lane than a new discovery.
The book I enjoyed the most was Dervla McTiernan's The Ruin. I suppose some of what I found most appealing about the book would be aspects others might find annoying. It was well-written and tightly plotted. I found Cormac and Aisling to be well-drawn. I found them both believable, even in their inconsistencies., although liking the characters is not something I find necessary in a novel. In fact their inconsistencies were part of what I liked best about the novel. The intellectual part of me wants a hard-hitting super-detective but humans aren't really like that. The people who do well and get ahead aren't always the smartest, aren't any different than you or I; they work hard and learn how to play the game. We all do that. We want our heroes to be superheroes. We also tend to think we are somehow inferior because we have to learn to play the game to succeed. McTiernan plays on that in this novel. Cormac is also in a difficult, liminal period of his career, and is not sure which steps are the right steps. He stumbles. He has a blind spot. He cannot see the true nature of an old friend. But again most of us are like that in the same way. I was rooting for him even as I was cursing his missteps. I will read the author's next novel when it is released.
The novel I liked the least was Kate Atkinson's Transcription. Juliet's combination of naiveté, cunning, and obtuseness made her a bit of a cipher, which was the point of course. I suspect, as historical fiction, it hits close to the truth, and to the pettiness of most of life. Is that what made me uncomfortable? I'm not certain. Perhaps I wanted Juliette to become more self-aware, not that I've managed any such thing. Anyway, that is no fault of the novel, merely of the reader. Although the novel was beautifully written, and carried me along while I was reading, it is already fading away in my memory.
I enjoyed the other two novels. I wrote about The Gunners here, albeit only briefly. The characters are marvelously complex. And although the plot wends its way through very easy themes and simple storytelling, there are moments when I think it is brilliant and might appeal to more literary readers as well. I found it satisfying.
Gillian Flynn's Sharp Objects is a very different kind of novel. Even thought it was written before Gone Girl, I found it both more satisfying and more troubling. The writing in Gone Girl was much tighter and the narrative more compelling, but for this reader at least the humanity seemed missing. But then I felt Amy's journal read like a contrived piece of artifice from the get-go, and I suppose I never got as angry at Nick as was intended either, as he reminded me of too many hapless young men of my son's generation. Although I felt no sympathy for either Amy or Nick, Camille was very compelling even if also completely maddening. But that is the thing, people who are caught in psychosis, who are the victims of abuse, act in ways that to the rest of us seem incomprehensible. Our towns and cities are full of such people, people whom we usually do not even deign to notice. Flynn is very good at uncovering the darkness that can lie hidden behind a veneer of civility and the comfortable stories we tell ourselves about our lives and our neighbors. I suppose this novel also gave me some insight into the later one, in that similar themes are explored, but here we have the softer, more vulnerable underbelly, and in the later novel, a harder shell has been formed. In Sharp Objects there was much that made this reader squirm in both frustration and discomfort, but there was also hope, a hope that had already been sealed off in Gone Girl. You can see where my preferences lie.
