Sunday, March 04, 2007

High Fidelity, Nick Hornsby

What I love about Nick Hornsby is that his books make me laugh out loud. They are escapist yet still meaningful and make you think. High Fidelity is his most famous book about a thirty something guy working at a "going nowhere" record store with "going nowhere" friends. The story picks up with when his girlfriend leaves him and he reflects on women in the past, women in the future, and where he is going with his life. It's thoughtful and hilarious and I enjoyed it down to the last drop. It had a great ending which some may not like, but the sort that makes my day.

Thursday, March 01, 2007

On Beauty, Zadie Smith

What a perfectly delicious book! Scrumptious down to the last word. This is a story about two families with professors as their heads of household living in Boston in a college centered middle class community. The Kippses and Belseys are long time rivals due to their divergent views on Rembrant's work. But that really is just background static. The book is mostly about the dynamics of the Belsey family and how they interact with one another and with the Kippses. I love this book because the characters are so vivid and there were at least five times that I said out loud, "yes this is the feeling- exactly". She just has a knack about explaining what you feel though she wrote about something so completely different. What I really liked was that the characters were likeable and their lives though dreary at times still had that realistic under current of having highs and lows much like any other regular family. Some stories like this take themselves too seriously and you finish wanting to weep for days, their stories haunting you to peices. But this isn't like that. It deals with harsh issues but in a manner that you read, absorb, but move on from still loving most of them anyways. It's a great book. I recommend it.