I believe this was the last of my Christmas books, given to me somewhat sheepishly by my mom. I used to be a pretty big Patrick McManus fan, and his story "How to Go Splat!" still makes me laugh when I think about it. (You can actually read the entire story online, thanks to Google books; I discovered this just now when it was one of the three results Google turned up for the search " 'pulpy mess' banana McManus " [the other two being Douglas Adams references!]).
This was one I hadn't read, and although I didn't think it was quite as funny as some of his other material (I recall also liking the book The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw), it did slip down pretty easily.
It also earned me a bit of credit (I think) with David's dad, when I knew what a chukar was and how difficult they are to hunt (thanks, "Chukar Madness"!). Score.
July 15, 2009
Patrick McManus, The Good Samaritan Strikes Again
Ken Follet, The Pillars of The Earth
The copy of The Pillars of the Earth that I read--loaned to me by a friend who had read it in her book club--was 983 pages long. Still, I polished it off much more quickly than the far shorter Mrs. Dalloway.
I finished the book in April, and am only just getting around to writing my review, but other than it being long, I mostly remember it as being not at well written, nonetheless highly engaging, and overall rather violent. It was rather like television, actually--perhaps an extended miniseries. It was highly descriptive, and certainly a page-turner, while still being almost unabashedly fluff. Almost, that is, because of its passages on Gothic architecture, which, although it's not my specialty, I at least found non-egregious if not particularly enlightening either.
Additionally, although the characters weren't always believable--the villains, in particular, being fairly consistently one-dimensional--the book did paint a fascinating portrait of life in the 12th century, and how much modern technology allows us to take for granted. Again, not precisely quality, but a quick-paced and interesting story that did get my heart pounding at times.
