Friday, September 08, 2006
Blood On The Saddle by Rafael Reig was good - a nice mix of Raymond Chandler and Jasper Fforde (which is interesting given that it was originally published right around the same time as The Eyre Affair). It plays with noir conventions, but there are interesting touches of fantasy: characters from books go missing in the real world, some bugs are actually discarded lines from despairing authors, magicians' assistants have their magically separated heads stolen from their bodies during performances, all of which add up to a mystery that I enjoyed quite a bit.
It made me want to read another Raymond Chandler book, so I pulled out Playback, his last. I swear he must have known it was his last because Marlowe totally gets tons of action and is even left with the possibility of a happy ending. Crazy.
But why I'm really here, posting close to midnight on a Friday night, is because of Special Topics In Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl. It's got the private school, outsider in the secret society, magnetic teacher thing going for it (think The Secret History lite), which made me keep turning pages quickly (about 400 in a day or so), but then I hit the last 100 and they started flying by. In fact, the mom I was babysitting for tonight came home when I was 20 pages from the end and I swear I broke more speed limits than usual so I could get home to finish it as soon as possible. I loved the main character, Blue, a misfit high school student wandering the country with her professor father (who describes a certain Ben & Jerry's flavor as "overwrought." Hee!), overeducated and constantly sourcing her life from the books she's read. They settle in one town for her senior year where she is drawn into a small circle of students orbiting one of the teachers who takes a special interest in her. That's all you're getting because I don't want to spoil anything, but I totally loved this book. (Daisy, you can borrow mine if you don't want to wait on the hold list.)
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It made me want to read another Raymond Chandler book, so I pulled out Playback, his last. I swear he must have known it was his last because Marlowe totally gets tons of action and is even left with the possibility of a happy ending. Crazy.
But why I'm really here, posting close to midnight on a Friday night, is because of Special Topics In Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl. It's got the private school, outsider in the secret society, magnetic teacher thing going for it (think The Secret History lite), which made me keep turning pages quickly (about 400 in a day or so), but then I hit the last 100 and they started flying by. In fact, the mom I was babysitting for tonight came home when I was 20 pages from the end and I swear I broke more speed limits than usual so I could get home to finish it as soon as possible. I loved the main character, Blue, a misfit high school student wandering the country with her professor father (who describes a certain Ben & Jerry's flavor as "overwrought." Hee!), overeducated and constantly sourcing her life from the books she's read. They settle in one town for her senior year where she is drawn into a small circle of students orbiting one of the teachers who takes a special interest in her. That's all you're getting because I don't want to spoil anything, but I totally loved this book. (Daisy, you can borrow mine if you don't want to wait on the hold list.)
Comments:
Whoa... there are 131 holds on the six copies at SFPL! Crazy. This must be really popular.
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