Way behind again in blogging my books...

Run by Ann Patchett. Not nearly as good as the other 3 Patchett books I've read. Not even close. (Though a couple of those, Bel Canto and Taft are fantastic.) Well-written, but not very interesting. Basically, just a bunch of stuff that happens to some people... Sometime such a book can be very interesting (Taft), but when the characters just aren't that engrossing, these types of books can drag. This one was mercifully short...

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. I picked this one out before finding out that it's popular again now because there's a DiCaprio/Winslet movie coming out based on it. I enjoyed reading the book, though it was considerably depressing. I guess I enjoyed it in a "There but for the grace of god . . ." way -- the book is about people whose lives are pale shadows of what they thought their lives would be. This is a plight of nearly all dreamers, and of people who have higher estimations of themselves than truth warrants. (The characters in the book probably fit both of these observations.) While I enjoyed the book, I find it unlikely many people under the age of 30 or so would enjoy it much.

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. Probably my favorite of this fiction round-up batch. Our protagonist tells about life in India through a series of letters to the premier of China. His stated purpose is to explain Indian "capitalism" through his tales of upward mobility out of poverty through the castes of India. Instead, he paints a series of impressionistic portraits of various aspects of life in India. I have close a reflection of reality these pictures are, but I enjoyed the ride through our "hero"'s life very much. I found out about this book through the Man Booker Prize, which I find to be the most reliable of the various fiction prizes for finding good books. (Far too many of them, like the Pulitzer, reward books that are full of very beautiful sentences as threads that are woven together to produce a rather mundane tapestry of a book. The Man Booker Prize doesn't often lose the forest while staring at the trees.)