Books and Movies

First of all, click over to this post and enter to win this awesome book:

Guernica by Dave Boling

As for what I’m reading - well, I’m in between books right now. I tried reading this:

When We Were Romans by Matthew Kneale

I couldn’t do it. I made it to page 50 before I gave up. The premise is intriguing: “Nine-year-old Lawrence is the man in his family. He carefully watches over his willful little sister, Jemima, and his mother, Hannah. When Hannah becomes convinced that their estranged father is stalking them, the family flees London and heads for Rome, where Hannah lived happily as a young woman. For Lawrence, fascinated by stories of popes and emperors, Rome is an adventure. Though they are short of money, and move from home to home, staying with his mother’s old friends, little by little their new life seems to be taking shape. But the trouble that brought them to Italy will not quite leave them in peace.”

The book is narrated by a 9-year-old boy. I have son who will be 9 in a little over two weeks. I talk to him on a daily basis. I love him - very much - but I don’t think I’d want to read a novel that is entirely made up of his inner thoughts and narration of daily events. However, I loved To Kill a Mockingbird, which is narrated by a 9-year-old girl, so maybe it’s purely the execution. Author Matthew Kneale has written not only in Lawrence’s voice, but with lots of misspellings, as if he actually wrote the book. Maybe that’s what pushed it over the top. I also couldn’t take the descriptions of his sister Jemima’s misbehavior - it made me want to lock her in an eternal time-out.

I did, however, find another reviewer who enjoyed the book - and several Amazon reviewers liked it enough to give it at least three stars. So it’s probably just me.

After finishing two World War II novels (Guernica and The Devil’s Arithmetic), I wanted something lighter, so I picked up:

The High-Tech Knight (Book 2 in The Adventures of Conrad Stargard) by Leo Frankowski

I’m not completely wasting my brain, however. I also started this:

Essays of the Masters edited by Charles Neider

I’m also planning to start:

The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway

and

The Sign of the Book by John Dunning

So, that’s what books are inhabiting my world this week. I’m off to read all of your Sunday Salon thoughts.