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get reading

For anyone who may be interested, this is to alert you that the competitors for The Morning News 2009 Tournament of Books have been announced; so you can start reading now. I'll still be working on 2005. In four or five years maybe I'll get around to these books, including the likely winner, Robert Belano's 2666. The book is over 900 pages long and is touted as masterpiece--how can it miss?

Once again, Powell's is offering a 30% discount on all tournament titles.

This is not turning into another book blog. I'll be back to knitting soon. This week I'm away from home and my camera. Also, the temps have been below zero since I got here and I didn't bring enough yarn. I'm having to ration my knitting.

round one: the plot against the bad boy's wife

I am not a literary critic, nor a book reviewer in any formal or 'official' sense; I am a reader. I used to read quite a bit and belonged to multiple book clubs. Eventually, however, graduate school happened and I was reading all day for work, and knitting and computer games happened and I found other ways to pass the time, and frankly, I became fatigued by contemporary literature. For years, when I did read for fun, I read classics and mystery novels because, for the most part, they did not annoy. I have an entire rant against authors who are only able to think up the beginnings of books and the editors who let them get away with it (apparently it's now acceptable to only seriously write the first two thirds of a book and then just fill up the last third with whatever random nonsense you come up with just to get the damn thing out the door), but I won't bore you with that.

So,my reviews will not be deep analyses or anything. I will try and keep them short and honest with a minimum of pretense.

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth

With World War II on the horizon, what if Charles Lindbergh, and not FDR, were elected President of the United States? What would change? Specifically, what would change for a Jewish boy named Philip Roth and his family? Easy to read for the quality of the writing; difficult to read for the scenes of Antisemitism and the growing sense of dread and panic as a child's safe, familiar world starts to dissolve.

The Bad Boy's Wife by Karen Shepard

This was an unpleasant book full of unpleasant characters. The character in whom I was most interested spent much of the book in a coma. I did not like this book. I do not recommend that you read it.

It's no secret that Plot made it to the final round of the tournament. It is well-written and feels like an 'important' book. Few books can stand against it, but Bad Boy's Wife is a particularly unworthy competitor.

Winner: The Plot Against America