Catching up! (Week 2)

Okay, okay! I'm finally catching up. Today is the day! I've got plenty of time and some smidgeon of focus.

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

Slow-paced and heavy (physically, philosophically, socially), this book is not the kind you bring to the beach (or maybe you do. I don't know. you might hang out at some really intense beaches). There are no good guys or bad guys. The dual protagonists each spend some time being horrible and likeable and almost always pitiable as they stumble through a series of magical realism fueled allegories (stress on the magical; one of them grows horns because that's just what happens when you fall out of an airplane apparently).

Rushdie excels in the sentence, paragraph and page. If you feel out of your depth in the chapter and book, losing plot threads or just rolling your eyes at how heavy handed some of the story-telling gets, it's the craft behind the language itself that will keep you reading.

The world is not quite as lovingly crafted as the language. Rushdie infuses the main characters with enough of his own Indian-ness that you feel how their heritage has defined them, but, beyond that, there isn't a tremendous sense of place and many details are left to the imagination. This lack of place reads as entirely intentional, since a lot of what Rushdie is exploring is the immigrant experience and a general loss of identity.

Bottom line; it's a pompous, self-important book with a meandering, barely-held-together plot and I freakin' love it.



Soon, I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman

And on the entirely opposite end of the spectrum...

Superhero novels! I love them. It's like a comic book that takes way longer to read and dispenses with all the pesky visuals.

This fast-paced adventure novel focuses on a strong female lead coming into her own as the newest member of a classic superhero team (and thank you, Joss Whedon, for making that such an accessible concept). The writing is exactly as good as it needs to be to not distract from the fast-paced storyline. The setting and characters are fleshed out exactly as much as they need to be to give even the casual comicbook lover a strong sense the world. If you're somehow unfamiliar with Batman, we probably shouldn't be friends and you are not the target audience for this book.

If you like superheroes and you like novels and you like a little comedy and mystery mixed in with your action, this book is great. It's subgenre popcorn fiction at its... well, right at its middle, really, but there aren't a lot of options in this narrow market, so enjoy it when you get it.

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Recommendations: I popped over to Christina M's blog and recommended a couple of teen zombie novels. Apparently I've read a lot of teen zombie novels. This was not intentional, but sometimes that's just how it goes.