The Useless Critic 2.0

well last night, shortly before midnight, I drew The Time Traveler's Wife to a close. wow- I have to say, that book annihilated my expectations. that's to say I was being kind of an elitist and like oh ho this book is adored by the masses TOO SACCHARINE FOR MY TASTES right? noooooo. now I see why it was/is so popular! it was an incredibly well-written book. Audrey Niffenegger? I now safely have faith in her as a writer. books like that are impressive, though, and seem to come about (for me at least) once in a blue moon. green moon. some kind of moon! the type of book you fear putting down and have to carry around you everywhere, even in the car where the motion makes you sick. and then I have thoughts, in between reading: WHOA, THAT OLDER LADY IN THE PARKING LOT HAD GLASSES, BROWN HAIR AND WAS GIVING ME THE EYE. MAYBE SHE'S ME FROM THE FUTURE? :o you know you've had those thoughts! okay....maybe you haven't. but yeah, an analogy occurred to me when I was getting to...

Finally, after toiling through it for half the year, I finished Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson, a book that won tons of accolades from the New York Times and others upon being released a few years back. which was not a bad book by any means- the translation from Norwegian to English by Anne Born captures a lot of, what I imagine to be, Scandinavian minimalism of the original. it's a very simple but elegant read, no overwriting to be had here. I don't know, it was like the literary version of looking at (good) landscape paintings. the thing is, though, I feel like I should have liked it a lot more than I did. towards the end, I was so bored and tired with it. I managed to read a few other books while trying to get through this and they all captured my attention much more fervently than Horses . A lot of it, I would think, was the extreme masculine sentiment of the book, the relationship between sons and fathers. You know, stuff I don't deal with it. and fishing, and h...