A few books

The Road, Cormac McCarthy

I finished this book, lo these many months ago, while visiting Maya in Chicago. I had a little cry, and then we went to see There Will Be Blood to complete my day of bleakness. Luckily, the day ended with a lot of booze and laughter while we watched the Oscars over IM with Sandy. Good times.

Anyway, I'm trying to say this book is bleak. But it's also really amazing, and one of the most affecting books I've read in a long time. This post-apocalyptic stuff is right up my alley, but even if you're not into that, I recommend giving it a chance anyway. McCarthy creates a horrifyingly believable world and characters so real, you almost wish you didn't care about them so much. I'm sad to learn that some idiot is trying to turn The Road into a movie. Even the presence of Guy Pearce (!) and Viggo Mortenson (!!) isn't enough to convince me this is a good idea.

The Historian, Elizabeth Kostova

This is a fun little adventure story about a couple of historians tromping across Europe on a hunt for Dracula. It's told from the perspective of a 16 year old girl, as she unravels the mystery around her parents' early life together, and the story is also told through letters from her father and other historians. This perspective gives it a young adult fiction feel, so of course I enjoyed it.

And of course, looks like Hollywood's making this into a movie as well. They'll probably play it very serious, like The DaVinci Code, and take all the fun out of it.

Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen

OK, so I was supposed to read this about six years ago for a Victorian Lit class that I absolutely hated, so of course I skipped it, along with just about every other book in that course (except for the Our Mutual Friend, the 800-page "loose baggy monster" by Charles Dickens, which I plowed through and LOVED). I'm so glad I finally got around to this. Austen is seriously hilarious, and here she's at her most tongue-in-cheek. I don't want to spoil my own fun by looking up any criticism of this work, but I think the whole novel is a joke. A parody of the Gothic novel, but also a response to the social critics who felt that reading Gothic novels was bad for women's minds. That they were too provocative, and women should stick to reading about flowers or some shit.

Anyway, I enjoyed it, but if you hate Austen, stay away because this one's super Austen-y.