At the beach

I brought these with me on vacation last week…

Nation, by Terry Pratchett, was charming and kinda cute, if a little simplistic. I’ve never read anything by Pratchett and I didn’t realize that he writes for young adults. I’m not a huge fan of YA, and I don’t much care for parallel universes, but I will forgive almost anything in a book that includes 19th century scientists. Oh yeah!

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, by Dave Eggers, holy cow, talk about truth in advertising! This book is totally what the title says it is, and I deeply regret everything I said at my last book group about not liking to read memoirs. The author was fresh out of college when both of his parents died just five weeks apart, leaving him to raise his seven-year-old brother, and this book is about that. The reason this memoir works for me, and The Glass Castle did not, is because Dave Eggers doesn’t just write about what happened, but he also writes about the fact that he is writing the memoir; he is very self-conscious about what he is doing. Where Jeanette Walls simply described, Dave Eggers, Dave Eggers… well I don’t know what he does. But you should read it.

The third book, Asleep in the Sun by Adolfo Bioy Casares, whoa. I wish I was better at reading Latin American authors. This guy was a great friend of Jorge Luis Borges and of course it’s got all that magical realism stuff in it that I keep trying to like. In this book, a guy’s wife trades bodies with a dog, and a mental hospital is involved. Shades of Kafka for sure. The back cover, and also the scholarly introduction, assure me that the novel is hilarious… but… um, okay. It’s short and sweet, though, and it definitely held my attention all the way through. Plus the protagonist is a watchmaker, and you know how I feel about fictional watchmakers. Hoo boy. (Or should I say hoo Bioy?)