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A Reader's reviews
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A Reader posted a review at 2007-12-13 10:12:36 for The Golden Compass Deluxe Edition (His Dark Materials) Rough Cut.
(Language: English)
  
Lyra Belacqua, eleven years-old, spirited, fearless, 'silver-tongued,' leads a carefree life in Oxford, UK, until children start to disappear all around her home, including her best friend Roger. Her adventure to find him leads Lyra to the North Pole, on the way meeting 'gyptians,' witches, and armor-clad warrior polar bears among others. I found this book to be so much fun, and appropriate for almost anybody age ten to eighty. Some parts I thought quite graphic for what I believed was marketed as a 'kids' book. Nonetheless, I read it in a frenzy. Highly entertaining, though not without its awkward elements. Lyra often slips into a watered down low-brow English vernacular. Pullman is no Twain in his mimicry of dialects. Also, trying to place yourself within this parallel universe is sometimes jarring because the style is not background rich. It is, however, heavily plot driven, and complimented by many charming aspects. Pullman's trope of the interplay of daemons and their humans adds a unique and subtle dramatic dimension to a story that would otherwise rely on flashy fantastical elements that've been done a million times over. And Ioric Byrnison, the armor-clad polar bear, is a hero you won't soon forget. 
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A Reader posted a review at 2007-11-20 05:57:56 for On Chesil Beach.
(Language: English)
Inspired me to read more by McEwan. I have never encountered a writer who could render the unspoken language between lovers so masterfully. This is a poignant, if not devastating short novel. Engaging and brilliantly written, it is not for those looking for an escape, rather for those who admire good writing. Left me attempting to grasp the significance that each mundane little moment in my hopelessly ordinary life could have...
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A Reader posted a review at 2007-11-20 05:35:43 for The Satanic Verses.
(Language: English)
Perhaps the only book within the last hundred years that elicited a 3 million dollar bounty to be placed on an author's head. I had to see what all the fuss was about and I learned that there is clearly no room for art in the world of fundamentalist Islam. This is a fascinating book about the anguish of experiencing spiritual revelation and the blurry line between good and evil. Rushdie is a erudite and readable, with a distinct narrative style all his own. One has to admire the courage of author for tackling such delicate subject matter. Easy to see how so many were offended, especially with so much room for misinterpretation. However, I'd have more sympathy for those who censored it if most of them actually read it.
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A Reader posted a review at 2007-11-16 09:06:01 for Life of Pi A Novel.
(Language: English)
Previous zoo owners and operators, Pi's entire family die in a shipwreck and Pi soon finds himself trapped with a hyena, an orangutan, and Richard Parker, a Bengal Tiger of horrifying and beautiful proportions, the most fully developed (yet unfantastical) Tiger in fiction in recent memory, and undeniably, the character with second billing in this bizarre story of survival, the power and beauty of faith, suspense, humor, and of course, love between the most unlikely of companions.
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A Reader posted a review at 2007-09-06 10:17:31 for Pablo Neruda Five Decades, a Selection (Poems, 1925-1970).
(Language: English)
This is a bilingual edition of Neruda's work which takes you through his most formative years as a poet. This book excludes Neruda's first two published collections, the second of which, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924) catapulted his career. Five Decades is a fairly complete survey of his major works after that point and includes all but a few of his last pieces. The translator of this work often takes great liberties, as he strives less for literal exactness and more for artful interpretation. I recommend this book to anyone interested in Spanish or anyone who loves poetry. Neruda is original, political, and in the original Spanish, capable of producing a musical quality to his verse as sublime as the sonatas of the greatest composers.
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A Reader posted a review at 2007-09-04 11:40:47 for Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable.
(Language: English)
A difficult read: enigmatic and sometimes inhuman but hilarious at the same time. I find myself often frustrated when reading it, but unable to ever throw it away. Make whatever sense of it that you can. Approach it from whatever angle seems best to you. Scholars debate this book and all of Beckett's oeuvre to this day, and no one has quite nailed him down yet. This book(s) will illicit a very palpable response from you; whether it will be of visceral disgust, the most profound sadness, or every type of laugh within the gamut of human experience will depend on you. For me it was all these things and much more...
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