I'm trying to think of the best way to quickly summarize
A Prayer for Owen Meany and I'm not sure if that can be done. The narrator, John Wheelwright, tells us about his childhood and young adulthood in New Hampshire of which his friend Owen Meany plays a large part. Owen is extremely short for his age and has a very unique voice which is shown in the text with all capital letters. Everyone thinks that Owen is either weird or special in some way and he himself thinks that he was placed on Earth for some special purpose by God.
I enjoyed the book quite a bit and found the friendship between the two to be very genuine. I also liked that it just accepts some events that could only be explained as miracles. My biggest qualm would be that Owen is just so much more interesting of a character than the narrator. The narrator is kind of a boring guy and at times is too passive. Even when one of the narrator's main story lines is resolved (the revelation of the identity of his father) he admits that it is totally anti-climactic and disappointing. And the bits about the narrator's current life are totally unnecessary. I'll give it an A-.
Also worth mentioning... the book cover of the copy I read is just sooooo bad. Please don't judge this book on a cover that is just a picture of a dressmakers dummy. Such an item is actually an important part of the story but the text specifically mentions that it was always dressed and never left uncovered... yet the picture is of an empty dummy. Seriously, who picked this book cover.
Also there were eleven list book mentions :
Animal Farm, 1984, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, Pride and Prejudice, Tess of the D'Ubervilles, Wuthering Heights, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Anna Karenina !
The biggest surprise for me while reading A Christmas Carol is that even though I'd seen several film versions and was already quite familiar with the story I was still very entertained and enchanted by Dickens' tale. I guess there's a reason that this is considered a classic. There's no point in recapping this because it is one of the few stories that literally everyone knows.
You know how sometimes there's some movie or musician that based on your tastes that you should really like but for some reason just doesn't connect with you? Not that you think whatever it is is bad... just not the greatest thing in the world and is massively over hyped? For me this list includes Arcade Fire, Wes Anderson films, the Coen brothers, Blade Runner and now Dashiell Hammett. I read The Maltese Falcon probably some ten years ago and was disappointed... and now I give him another shot with The Glass Key and I liked this one even less.
Some of the books on this Mystery list seem a bit lightweight and slight. Crocodile on the Sandbank is an example of this. The book was entertaining enough but in six months from now I'll have completely forgotten about it. Plus I'm probably not in the demographic that this book is aimed at. This is the first book in a series about Amelia Peabody, a rich English lady in the late 1800's that spends most of her time exploring Egyptian tombs. The book spends a lot of time setting up the characters and the mystery wasn't really that interesting (someone dressed up as a mummy keeps terrorizing their camp). I don't feel compelled to continue on with the series even though the main character was fascinating. I'll give it a B-.
One of the first "grown-up" authors I discovered as a kid in middle school was Michael Crichton. Despite reading a bunch of his books I never read The Andromeda Strain. I didn't even know what it was about... for some reason I thought it was about space travel or aliens or something. Instead it is about a mysterious organism/virus that is brought to Earth from the upper atmosphere and seems to instantly cause death in anyone exposed to it. Luckily the U.S. has readied a team of scientists and a special laboratory just in case this were to ever happen.
Of all the books on the list that I had previously read, On the Road was probably the one that I wanted to reread the least. I read it maybe fifteen years ago and I wasn't that impressed then. On a second reading my opinion hasn't changed that much. Overall it is well written and mildly entertaining and I can see how it tapped into a certain feeling back in the fifties but it isn't something I'd call an all time classic. Some qualms I have with it... first Dean Moriarty isn't the greatest character to be around. Even on the second reading I quickly grew tired of him and his destructive ways. Next, the narrator doesn't exude that much personality... I still don't get why he always felt the urge to get away and travel. He just gives into Dean way too much. Also, for a relatively short book it just feels so long... the whole book is just one thing after another without much thought given to the narrator's feelings. There's one chapter that's maybe 15-20 pages in which the author falls in love while in California that has enough material for an entire book... but afterwards he just moves on and barely thinks about that incident. I guess I just find the book a bit frustrating and overrated. I'll give it a B. Also it mentions Of Mice and Men.
