book report IV

I've finished a bunch of new books lately. Some have been good, but none have really bowled me over.

Four Louis L'Amours—Buckskin Run, a delightful collection of short stories. Most of them I would have loved to see as full novels. Night Over the Solomons, a book of short stories set in the Far East during World War II. Okay, but not stellar. Westward the Tide, which I liked quite a bit. What can I say, I'm a sucker for a wagon train! And The Iron Marshal, which was a nice departure from your standard western. The protagonist was unusual, the main villain was unusual, and the whole story really had a nice unique flavor to it.

I reread These Thousand Hills, the final installment in A.B. Guthrie, Jr.'s western series, and was disappointed. I don't remember it (or the prequel to the whole series, The Big Sky) as being quite as boring and non-compelling as they were this time around. It's a shame, really—but I suppose that's the way series go.

I finally finished a Civil War book, Gray Ghosts and Rebel Raiders, on guerrilla warfare in the South. It was definitely readable, but not gripping. I figure it'll be a good reference work.

In new fiction, I was a little disappointed. I read Anita Diamant's The Red Tent, which had been recommended to me by several women. And it was a good book. Imaginative and well told. But it wasn't amazing. It was like a sandwich—nice and light, tasty, but not filling, and easily forgettable.

Even more disappointing was Year of Wonders, a novel about the plague. It's very unusual for me to pick up a book in a bookstore and buy it, and since I usually base my decisions on the cover art, binding, and the summary on the back, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when it wasn't an amazing book. But I was. I'd really been looking forward to it, and was quite pleased when it came up in the rotation. And it wasn't a bad book. There were things I quite liked about it; particularly a series of passages as the main character studied the hands of those who had died of the plague, and thought of the capabilities that had lain in those hands and been taken away with the death of the person. Those were a very nice touch, thought-provoking and poignant. But there was very little else in the book that was new or truly unique. Most of what happened was what you'd expect. And since the book opened with a framing device that made the events of the plague a flashback, you already knew who had died and were left with the question of why keep reading when you knew it was going to be depressing? I think it was an unfortunate choice of devices, since the opener didn't grab you so hard you couldn't have let go if you wanted to.

(Refreshingly, I also read the movie companion to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which impressed me all over again with the dedication and vision of the filmmakers and made me wish I could be one of them for the rest of the series.)