The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

The 2006 Booker prize winner, but I can't say that I was impressed with it. Omniscient viewpoint, with quite a distance from the characters, which kept me, as the reader, at a distance also.

A third of the book could be cut. Way too much detail in places. The tenth description of the setting is the same as the first - overdone. A little goes a long way in those cases.

There wasn't much to keep me reading either. No overarching plot device to direct my attention. Reading it got to be a chore.

Yet it won the big prize. There are also an embarrasing number of typos, usually extra consonants at the beginnings of words. I am certain the author did not intend those, they were not dialect, but in the narrative. I have no idea what happened, or who was at fault.

For a better treatment of the Indian diaspora, read the short stories of Jhuumpa Lahiri.

Had a Good Time by Robert Olen Butler

I can't say enough good things about this collection of short stories. Using antique postcards as inspiration, Butler produced some great work. The process of writing one of the stories is chronicled on the fsu website - fourteen two-hour videos...

Only Revolutions by Mark Z. Danielewski

A gimmick book. Clever but empty of content. It reminds me of a teenage girl playing with pretty fonts. The only impressive thing is the cover, and that was done by Jessica Grindstaff, not the author. How did this become a National Book award finalist?

Europe Central by William T. Vollmann

I just don't get this novel. I hate to say bad things about it, since it won the 2005 National Book Award, but I think it is deliberately obfuscated. It seems to me to be more of an essay than a novel. An 800 page essay with creative non-fiction chapters sprinkled around. The theme is "Europe:bad", or maybe "Fascism, Communism: bad". You really need to be an expert on the footnotes of European history to make much sense out of it. Definitely not recommended by me.

The March by E. L. Doctorow

An excellent book, in Doctorow's distinctive style. I read "Ragtime" long ago, but the author's style has not changed. There are a lot of characters here, but somehow Doctorow can pull that off, where in the novel "Trance" I was confused and bored.

The author has the skill to examine the complex motivations of his characters, and that is what makes the novel distinctive. He puts in the little classic twists and turns, and weaves everything together. My only nit-pick is that he does abandon some characters and never wraps up their stories, but they are minor characters.

A National Book Award finalist.

Fiction Workshop report

Had my third workshop with David Fulmer last night, and if I can survive this class it will be a miracle. Reading my writing samples, out loud, before the class and the instructor, makes me break out in a cold sweat. Mic-fright. Painfully shy. Wallflower that wilts in the public gaze.

But it's good for me. The class is great, David is doing an excellent job, the other students are supportive. I'll survive, I hope.

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

An excellent book, the Booker Prize winner. I've read a lot of prize winners in the last two years, and this one is one of the best. It's imaginative and complex, something that I always like, and the plot propels us forward, something that is usually lacking in literary novels.

I won't give any anything here, but part of the complexity comes from multiple layered novels. The viewpoint character is writing her memoir. There is a character inside the memoir writing a novel, and inside that novel a character is writing science fiction stories. This is all wrapped in Atwood's novel. Very creative. The most compelling mystery is how the novel inside the memoir came about - no spoilers here.

Highly recommended.