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Tuesday, February 21, 2006

This weekend I finished Dancing Bear by James Crumley, the second of his Milo series. While entertaining enough to finish, I'm growing impatient with him. I'm not quite sure why that is when I enjoyed TLGK so much. Is it that the novelty has worn off? I do know that the drug use, for whatever reason, seems so much more prevalent in these other books and is bordering on redundant and boring. Oh, they're using cocaine. Flip the page. Oh, there they are again, snorting cocaine. Flip the page. Oh, now Milo is dead drunk. It just gets old after a while. I think I may take a break and finish up the rest of his books at a later date.

Sunday evening I read Garner by Kirstin Allio, which was a little frustrating. It was about a murder in a small New England town in the 1920s. Sort of. Mostly, it was about the town dealing with change, alternately resisting it or embracing it as an economic necessity and the tensions that arose when an insular community was forced to open itself up to outsiders. It took a bit to get into. While I liked the structure and the writing, the mystery never came into focus and the ending was extremely vague and unsatisfying.

While I was in that mood, I thought I'd read a chapter or two of Conversations With The Fat Girl by Liza Palmer, determine that it was as ridiculous as I thought it would be (I have yet to read a chick lit book by anyone other than Jennifer Weiner who can manage a well-rounded fat character), and move on to something better. Surprisingly, I found myself reading the whole thing. Unlike other authors whom I suspect have never met anyone who weighed over 120 pounds in his or her life (coughJaneGreencough), Palmer's Maggie was a very convincing fat girl, even if her actual size was never stated. Again, it was mostly wish fulfillment (Maggie totally gets the guy in the end), but there were parts that rang uncomfortably true for me, so it was not without depth.

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