I can hear the cries of my children, "Mommy, we're hungry! Mommy, we don't have any clean clothes! Mommy won't say anything! Mommy isn't breathing! ..oh, wait, she's just in a reading coma!"
Yes, pretty much all I've been doing is reading. I have read Neil Gaiman's American Gods. I thought it was mildly entertaining, if you like the idea of wise-cracking old people who are sort of gods pissing, copulating, and eating their way around the seedier parts of America while the human protagonist goes along with just about anything asked of him with little in the way of real curiosity outside of a general curiosity to know what's going on and what's his role. His role? I still don't know. Fun.
Oddly, the gods in American Gods reminded me of Anthony Bourdain's kitchen workers in his Kitchen Confidential book, which I also recently read. Bourdain compares restaurant workers to pirates. They swear, copulate, try to copulate, talk about copulating, mercilessly tease, and generally behave badly to each other all the while maintaining some unwritten code of loyalty to one another. This could be fun for a few years. However, I'd eventually be bored by it all.
That's exactly how Gaiman's characters were written. And that is how I felt about the gods and people in Gaiman's book: I was soon bored of them. Not much depth. What is much more fun to read are the one star reviews for the book on Amazon. I am not the only one to wonder where the promised Wonder went. And as I wasted much of my youth reading really good science fiction, I'm hard to please. My husband, however, loved the book. I'll have to have him give a counter review.
I very much liked Kitchen Confidential. Bourdain is a good writer, so good, I'm now less inclined to eat out. It's not a book about mouth watering food. It's about the crazy people who work for and run restaurants. I actually bought the book because I had read on the back he had graduated from the CIA. Idiot me thought that meant the Central Intelligence Agency. The idea of an ex-agent who then became a chef sounded interesting. After pages and pages detailing his past illegal drug use, I kept wondering how he was going to end up at the CIA. Oh, he does, at the Culinary Institute of America. Despite that, I loved the book. I may read more of them. I'm interested to know how his travels throughout the world have impacted his opinions on food.
série de nomes de grande esforço para ajudar, incluindo os Estados Unidos, um cantor popular pop - a "irmã frutos" Kay Steven Perry.
Posted by: Timberland Botas | 09/16/2012 at 11:13 PM