A big whopper of a book, for which the reviews are either enthustiastically postive (almost anywhere you look, and it also won the National Book Award) or soo soooo negative as to be completely comical.

I fall somewhere between. Not the best book I’ll read this year: it’s sprawling and sloppy and segues awkwardly. Not the worst book I’ll read: it’s descriptive and evocative and critical and inquiring.

I thought the beginning was kinda confusing, as one event in the 1963 chapter flashes forward to 1967, and a lot of characters get introduced in offhand ways, leading me to create a flowchart (that I stopped needing after a bit) of who knew who and who was related to who. But once you get going, that all went away.

I thought it was sort of a rough-and-tumble “boy” book. If you’ve read any W.B. Griffin, you might know what I mean. Crudely descriptive, rude when it doesn’t have to be, but the way you imagine things in the military often are. Some things that the bad review mentions, I realized I had kind of chalked up to the “boy” ness of it. Maybe that’s me being kind? Maybe that’s not really acceptable in a book acclaimed to be of ‘such’ caliber? But it didn’t bother me the way it did that reviewer.

On the other hand, I can agree (with the bad review) that some of the writing isn’t great. (Although there were certainly chapters where I felt he hit his stride.) But I would say that wasn’t really The Point here. Isn’t the convoluted confusion of a messy mixed up war what the reading experience of this was like? Isn’t the disconnected rambling way in which these characters make decisions and relate to one another part of what war does to you? Doesn’t The Colonel and all his ridiculousness serve as a macrocosm for U.S. foreign policy and procedures of the time?

It’s certainly one of very few Vietnam novels to have fairly major Vietnamese characters, (as pointed out by fridaysixpm, one of the reasons I decided to read it), some of whom are fleshed out more than others, yes.

I didn’t like the end. I thought the “big event” of the end happened so weirdly that I felt sort of detached from it, and I really didn’t see the point in having a) the character who ended the book be the one to end it or b) those particular sentiments at the end as they are really in opposition to what I think the real feeling of it was.

But I certainly thought it was worth reading: intense, rambling, yet strikingly evocative. If “knowing the Vietnam canon”, so to speak, is one of your reading goals/needs, then I don’t see how you can pass this up. It certainly adds another view, and one I haven’t quite seen done before. And the ultimate truth of the experience relayed emotionally here is one I think agrees with other, perhaps more easily readable, of the famed Vietnam books (O’Brien, Caputo, and others).

I didn’t like this. He describes it as a “parable” but that was part of what made it feel one-dimensional (or two-dimensional. some dimensional flatter than three) to me.

Hornby’s second “anthology” of his monthly book review essays in The Believer (the first was “The Polysyllabic Spree” which I commented on briefly back in 2005).

While I don’t always agree with his reviews, or I might not be interested in a particular book that he’s reading, I usually enjoy the tone of these write ups. The random associations that come about between books you didn’t expect to resonate with each other; the twists and turns that lead you off in a random direction, far from your original plans; and the pure joy when a book hits you in just the perfect moment for you and that book to collide.

Thanks to his comments, adding to my possibly to be read list (as opposed to the actual to be read pile of things already purchased or borrowed):

• “Every Secret Thing” Laura Lippman (fiction)
  
• “Blood Done Sign My Name” Timothy B. Tyson (memoir)
  
• “Oh the Glory of It All” Sean Wilsey (memoir)
  
• “What Good Are the Arts?” John Carey (nonfiction)
  
• “Death and the Penguin” Andrey Kurkov (fiction)
  
• Joshua Ferris “Then We Came to the End” (fiction) (this one’s been reviewed all over in the past year, but this is the first review to make me think Hmmmmm)

A return to Nathan Zuckerman, hero of old. Just as neurotic, but now bitter, old, despairing, and at the end of things. Impotent in more ways than (the literal) one.

Interesting juxtaposition between the defeated Zuckerman being written by a Roth at the top of his game.

If you had read the previous Zuckerman books, I don’t see how you can pass this one up. It’s not a smash hit the way other recent Roth books have been (American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, Plot Against America = all great) — and it’s no Sabbath’s Theater — but it’s got some nice closure on the NZ story.

a.k.a. “Cuirt an Mhean Oiche” by Brian Merriman.

A bawdy Irish poem. Lots of fun.

(By the way, Ciaran Carson is an accomplished poet in his own right, as well.)

Book 4 of “A Song for Fire and Ice”.

I had forgotten how great this series is (let’s see, I read Book 3 in…2003, woah). As with other fantasy series of similiar ilk, there are many, many storylines with a whole cacophony of important players. There’s sure to be at least one or two characters you’re interested in following. I am loving Arya’s storyline the most, although I do have a soft spot for the Kingslayer. (Don’t you picture him as a strapping gent, like Mads Mikkelsen or Heath Ledger…)

My other mainstay fantasy series has hit a rough patch given that Robert Jordan died recently without completing it… I’m sure there are bereft readers all over the world on that one! I hope there are no worries on that count here!