El misterio del principe

Wow, Tree, you read fast. My excuse is that I've been reading in Spanish.

Harry Potter y el misterio del principe was a delight to read. Since I assume I'm about the last member of Western civilization to have read it, I won't say too much about it, except that I'm looking forward to book seven.

My question for the day is this: Is J.K. Rowling a genius or just lucky? Are there other people writing books just as good as hers who never get discovered? I would tend to think there are. That is, she may be a genius, but she is certainly lucky.

Dubliners

This might be a good book to use in a class on Ulysses. You could have the students read one story per class period, simultaneously with the great comic epic, and they might feel less confused and overwhelmed. In Dubliners, you get traditionally written descriptions of some of the same characters (in fact the writing sometimes seems jarringly formal compared with U's), and a sense of the town's ethos.

My favorite stories were "The Dead" (beautiful), "Araby" (an amazing portrayal of the range of an adolescent's emotions), and I guess "After the Race" (neatly done, and also very good at showing emotional states).

I feel like I failed to understand most of the stories. This is when I really miss having a book discussion group.

A Fine Balance

We all read for different reasons, so others are no doubt justified in their liking of it, but I was disappointed by A Fine Balance.

It reminded me of two books: The Grapes of Wrath and Dominique Lapierre's The City of Joy. It's like Grapes in the way everything seems to be getting worse and worse. It reminded me of City because it features beggars in the slums of India and because it seems to be written to make a point.

No one can say that Rohinton Mistry's characters are unrealistic. They're complex yet predictable. They're true to themselves, yet surprising. Yet it still seemed like they were being used for something, which made them somehow less than human.

I think I missed that particularity that makes reading worthwhile. The books I admire have a strong sense of place. If you detach a person from their world, you can't understand them. The author has a duty to describe the world. If she does it right, you've done something by reading her book that you never could have done on your own; your eyes have been opened and your soul enlarged.

For all the manifest Indian weirdness in Mistry's book, I still felt like it could all have taken place anywhere. I'm not going to remember it like I remember the slums even in the badly written (or at least badly translated) City of Joy, or the dirty campsites and dusty fields of the Grapes of Wrath. Good writing makes me think, "This is what it feels like to be alive." I get more of that from one paragraph of Colette than I did from the 600 pages of this novel.

Sure, there are human truths and inspiring moments. I learned from the characters. I felt like there were morals to be drawn from the story. I laughed out loud and even cried once or twice. But I never learned what it was like to be the characters, or maybe I just failed to understand them. I wanted to breathe Indian air for a while, but I never got outside of myself.