By Its Cover- Love and Other Near Death Experiences- Pt. 2

By Its Cover is my completely independent 2-part book review column. Selections are made based entirely on the book's cover. I'm testing the old saying in my quest to find new authors.

Title: Love and Other Near Death Experiences
Author: Mil Millington

Part One

He could have died, Rob, the main character. But he didn't. He had to return towels and got tied up in traffic. So he was late to the pub, that ended up getting smashed to bits...hence the traffic. That he 'missed' death, by a set a fluke-ish missteps, sets him to wondering just how much weight he should put on the mundane everyday decisions. It hampers his relationships, his work, his life. So he sets off on a journey unto himself with an ex-Marine (yeah, it's a British book, but the guy comes over from Nebraska...long story).

That's the plot.

My opinion is that it kinda was pithy. Maybe I expect too much from books. Maybe I'm too geared into literature to give modern fiction any props. Maybe I don't get British humor. Maybe I'm out of touch with how people act and think in the world. Maybe it just wasn't good. Maybe one of the secondary characters was enormously grating. Yeah, a pointless cruel character, one that is supposed to multi-dimensional and yet just refuses to submit to change, can ruin a book. The kind where, when someone asks what you think of the book you say, "It would have been better if so-and-so hadn't been in it." This had one of those...and a whole lot of cussing. (again, call me a prude but I'd feel wrong if I didn't let you know.

Mr. Millington redeemed his book some by mentioning Jane Eyre, one the books I love more than any, near the end. And there was a Mansfield Park shoutout. Still...I'll pass on his other books.

By Its Cover- Stupid and Contagious pt.2

By Its Cover is my completely independent 2-part book review column. Selections are made based entirely on the book's cover. I'm testing the old saying in my quest to find new authors.

Title: Stupid and Contagious
Author: Caprice Crane

Part One

I finished this blindingly fast, as is often the case with chick lit books. They're heavy on conversation- short, quippy/quirky dialogue that's a breeze to read. At points it was laugh-out-loud funny.

There were two main characters, a guy and a girl. Yeah, you can see where this is going. It's told in a kinda past/present first-person narrative, usually in alternating chapters. I think this was a risk because first person is such an intimate way of telling a story. The cover says the girl, named Heaven, is the 'sexy heroine'. But I think the guy, a late-twenty-something aspiring inventor/record producer named Brady, completely upstages her. He's a more full-drawn character, for as deep as chick-lit gets. Or perhaps it was my budding entrepreneur-ness that connected, in the reader-ly way, with his trying, failing and flailing.

There is a good deal of language in this. Call me a prude, (and a frequent reader of old British classics) but I felt I should let you know. Some of the plot points felt contrived or forced page-eaters that could have been left out- the original firing of Heaven, the Kurt Cobain gun incident. And the ending could have been a little less fairy-tale if only one of the two things happening. Rarely in life do you get it all. But I guess we read books, fiction books, to escape life.

By Its Cover- Little Town Where Time Stood Still- pt.2

By Its Cover is my completely independent 2-part book review column. Selections are made based entirely on the book's cover. I'm testing the old saying in my quest to find new authors.


Part One
If you know me, you know it rarely takes me long to finish reading a book. Even Anna Karenina I finished in the 3-week library lending period.

It was a dual edition, it had The Little Town Where Time Stood Still and Cutting It Short. It takes place in a small Czech village. At times it was sheerly brilliant, the imagery and the language, at other graphically disturbing, a chapter about a pig-killing. I felt like I missed something. Maybe something was lost in translation, maybe I'm too straightforward to see the genius that was said to be Bohumril Hrabal.

I'll try the 'random book selection' thing again. Hopefully, it will be more of a success for me.