Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Wait, it couldn't really have taken me almost three effing weeks to read The Night Life Of The Gods by Thorne Smith, right? Right? Man, that's lame. Sorry about that. It started out as so amusing and satirical and I loved Daffy and her uncle Hunter and the family dynamic and was excited to get to the whole bringing the Greek gods to life thing, but it started dragging on and on and Hunter and Meg didn't even hit the museum until past the halfway mark and by the time I got there, I'd lost any momentum and my rational thinking started up, so my reading slowed. When the book finally did get to the gods, they lacked depth and were each reduced to one or two buffoonish personality quirks, which disappointed me quite a bit. Plus Daffy, the character I liked the most, and her family, who were good foils, virtually disappeared for a good third of the book, and the descriptions of the chaos created by the gods newly brought to life was exhausting and a little horrifying, considering my idea of a good party is inviting a couple of people over for pizza followed by a game of Stock Market Tycoon (true story). That's not to say I didn't enjoy a good part of the book or that it didn't give me anything to think about. For instance, I found Hunter and Meg's conversation about the nature of wicked people (and those desperately pretending to be wicked because it was fashionable) to be insightful and still very much relevant, but there wasn't enough of that kind of deeper satire. So, while it made me laugh, I think I'll stick with Evelyn Waugh instead.
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