Last week was blessed vacation week, and a time, I thought, to catch up on a lot of reading. More fool I. Instead, I ended up halfway through 3 books, between reading to the kids and trying to decide what's a beach book and trying not to take my Japanese dictionary to the beach...
The one book I managed to finish was James Lee Burke's The Neon Rain. I had high hopes for this, because I loved Cimarron Rose, and Neon Rain is the start of his other long-running series, about Dave Robicheaux, a cajun detective. Unfortunately, I think Burke's reach exceeded his grasp in this one. The book wants to be all about the horrors of American policy in Nicaragua, and how immoral it is to use the Sandinistas, but that's hard to pull off when the vantage point is a policeman in New Orleans. As a result, it always feels like the real story happens before the novel, and Dave Robicheaux is just cleaning up some loose ends that don't really matter so much.
On the plane, I started reading The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear to the kids. This German novel is the story the adventures of a bluebear from his earliest youth through 13 1/2 lives (bluebears live 27 lives, the narrator tells us). Only a 100 pages in, because reading out loud is slow going, but the book is very funny, and the illustrations are very cute. (Drawn by the author). The book is very episodic, and Jenna tells me it remains so (she's halfway through), but that plays to the author's strengths, I think, which is that he throws one neat idea out after another. From a Giant whale that is also related to sharks, cyclopes, and saurians, to a carnivorous plant-island, to minipirates, the author's inventiveness drives this book, and it would be a shame to tie it down too much to a strict plot.
On the trip, I began reading The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. I'm still only 140 pages in (the first volume is 700 pages -- argh!), and it's slow going. New characters are introduced at a moment's notice, only to be disposed of 5 or 10 pages later. Unfortunately, it's hard to tell when you first meet a character whether he's going to be a major character or not, and my Westerner's bias makes it hard to tell all the Chaos, Changs, Suns and Ts'aos apart. That having been said, once I hit my stride, I've been enjoying the book tremendously. One interesting thing to me is how amoral almost all of the major characters are (I'll call anyone who survives for 2 chapters a major character). They change allegiance for money on a regular basis, they ignore warnings from Heaven, they desert their underlings without a second thought, and, when someone finally comes along to punish them, it turns out that the new guy is just as bad as the one before. This is really different from, say, The Tale of the Heike, which has a very strong moral current--the author of that book always lets you know that the Taira clan deserve to be brought down. The author of the Romance is much more ambivalent about the movements of history.
I began Night Vision by Paul Levine, but there isn't much to say about it. It's kind of funny, and that's it. I also read more of Out, but nothing new there either.
I've been reading Treasure Island to Moshe, and it really is a wonderful book. Stevenson has a great knack for having his people speak very differently, which is something I always admire in an author. Dr. Livesey is very easy for the kids to understand, whereas the latest chapter we read is almost all Long John Silver talking, and it's in such a thick argot that I had to translate constantly for the kids.
Hopefully I'll make some headway on some of these books, and be able to give an actual comment on them later.
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