Saturday, September 18, 2010

Short Responses

I'm liking the Goodreads platform -- perhaps a little too much: the format encourages an Entertainment Weekly sort of brevity. Perhaps the medium imposed the predilection, or maybe age has just made me impatient. In either case I'm increasingly disinclined to give lengthy consideration to perfectly good books.

If you're already a GR member, do feel free to "fwiend" me (I use my real name). If you're just curious, here are a few responses to stuff I've recently read:

Rock & Roll Will Save Your Life by Steve Almond, here.

Pompeii by Robert Harris, here.

Killing Rommel by Stephen Pressfield, here.

What Disturbs Our Blood by James Fitzgerald, here.

I try not to get snarky on this blog, but at GR I occasionally lapse: here are my thoughts on Ellis's Less Than Zero.

And finally, a book my wife (and many others) devoured, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, here.

2 comments:

DarkoV said...

As I did things ass-backwards, I saw the movie on Netflix first (highly recommended) and then picked up the p'back version of "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo". Since I had the scope of the movie, errrr, scoped out, it has been interesting getting filler into the mix, seeing where (and guessing why) certain sections of the book never made it to the movie.
It's no Jim Thompson, but it reads quickly and, aside from having, as you put it, a "put-downable" character, I find it will be a book I easily release from ht confines of my house.

Whisky Prajer said...

I was a little gob-smacked to see Michael Ondaatje giving the book his unreserved thumbs-up. I guess it scratched an itch.