REVIEWS: Summer Reading

This summer I visted Indianola, IA, Washington, DC and Las Cruces, NM. While travelling, I caught up on some summer reading: Saturday by Ian McEwan, The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling and The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.

The Line of Beauty. The first gay-themed novel written by an openly gay author to win the most prestigious book prize behind the Nobel Prize: the Man Booker Prize. Hollinghurst's The Swimming-Pool Library is a classic of 8o's gay fiction. I read it years ago and recalled it to be a engagingly prurient romp. Unfortunately The Line of Beauty, although prurient is decidely not engaging. It is the story of an ambitious, over-educated gay graduate of Oxford who finagles his fascination with his schoolmate who is the hunky scion of a Conservative Member of Parliament to a complicated pseudo-familial association with the entire kinship network of his object of desire. The book is set in Thatcherite England, which coincided with the height of the AIDS epidemic. The overall plot of the book is engrossing but the protagonist, Nick Guest is quite unlikeable and the effect is quite distancing. I found myself unpleasantly drained after finishing the novel.

Saturday. A couple of years ago I read Ian Mcewan's novel Atonement and enjoyed it very much. He really is a great writer, as many many people agree. I read an excerpt of his latest work, Saturday in the New Yorker earlier this year and asked for the book for my birthday. While stuck in Denver International Airport for an extra 5 hours due to summer thunderstorms I made great headway through the book. It is about one day in the life of Henry Perowne, a London brain surgeon who waes up very early and sees a 747 jet on fire as it approaches Heathrow airport on a significant Saturday in Spring 2003: there's a huge peace rally scheduled for London that day. Perowne has a small circle of relationships: his wife, his teen-aged son, his aneasthetist, his daughter, his wife's father, his Alzheimer-afflicted mother. McEwan works his magic with this limited cast of characters to present what seems like a stunningly real set of interactions and feelings that the reader loses the sense of reading fiction and becomes immersed in the story. When I finally reached my destination I could not put the book down and by the time I left a few days later I left the book with my partner so he could get a better sense of what I had been regaling him with for days. McEwan won his Booker Prize for Amsterdam, which I haven't read yet, but definitely intend to!

The Kite Runner. It seemed like everyone had a copy of this book. I didn't really know what it was about, but then a friend said that the relationship between two pre-pubescent boys in 1970s Afghanistan was at the core of the novel and I became interested. Khaled Hossein does an excellent job of portraying the complex and multi-layered nature of not only the relationship between the boys, but also between their fathers and between the fathers and sons. Father-son tensions, expectations and responsibilities are the real center of the novel. They provide a powerful emotional connection to any reader. In the end the plot heads to a harrowing climax, which seems a bit far-fetched but still leaves a lingering impression.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. This is a very fun book for anyone who is interested in mathematics and/or mysteries. It starts with the appearance of a dead dog with a garden fork sticking out of it. The story is told from the viewpoint of a probably autistic 15 year old boy living in the suburbs of London. The boy, named Christopher, is very interested and good at mathematics, so for example the chapters are numbered using prime numbers instead of regular ordinal numbers. It's surprisingly compelling to view a number of important events which happen to Christopher through his eyes and empathize with his experience. I liked the book so much that I gave my copy of the book to my niece, which is what I think one should do with art that one likes--recommend and share it with others.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.The sixth Harry Potter novel is another huge book of adventures of the petulant, teenaged wizard. It is also a much darker story than the other books in the series, with the death of an incredibly significant character. It does leave a lot of questions unanswered for the seventh and last book, like "Is Snape good or bad?", "Can Harry beat Voldemort?", "Will Hermione and Ron become a couple?" and "What will happen to the Weasleys and Hogwarts?" Overall the book was a fun read, but it did seem somewhat similar to the two previous books.