Got to buckle down here with these book posts! Less than 2 weeks (eek!) until this year's reading challenge is over (my start/end is between Christmas & New Year's, which tends to be a fairly quiet time for me and none of the Jan 1st start-up/resolutions pressure!) and I would like to be pretty caught up with my book posts so I can pull together my much anticipated "year in review"/best of 2008 book post.
I am pretty sure I would have not read this next book (at this time) if it wasn't for my Kindle. One of the good things about the Kindle is the anonymity of it, there is no book cover to glance (a bad thing for fans of book covers, which I am)... and while I very rarely read in public, I think I still would have been pretty embarrassed even taking this book up to counter at the bookstore. It has been difficult enough 'fessing up and buying books in The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, but I think The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows may just be the all-time emasculating title of all time! And another pro-Kindle aspect was the price, this one is still in hardcover (I typically wait for paperbacks), so retails for $22 and I got it for $9.99.
So why did I read the book?! Well, it seemed to have good word-of-mouth which I think is the best kind of buzz (cynically I suspect publishers are the impetus, but still if it takes off, there must be a reason). Also I was looking for something easy to read, my first non-fiction Kindle experience was a good one, but fiction requires a little more attention... so I still felt the need to just stick a toe to test out the e-book waters with something light-ish. I succeeded. This is an epistolary novel... love that word (just in case, to avoiding having folks run off to the cyber-dictionary, it just means a novel told completely that just means a novel told in a series of letters)... but anyhow, I sped right through this post-WWIII novel... and loved it!
This book was picked as one of Time Magazine's Top 10 Fiction Books of the Year... #7 to be exact (this week's print year-end list issue only highlights the Top 5 Fiction and Non-Fiction books) and Lev Grossman so perfectly and succinctly summarizes my feelings about this book, that I'll happily give him credit and quote him (and I just researched that he's male (thought so, but didn't want to assume) and is two years younger than me, so that makes me feel better):
After wanting to like so many WWII-related books (i.e. Suite Francaise, A Thread of Grace), it was so nice to finally be fully engaged in one... and I credit though the book's format and charm, which made it very readable without dodging the atrocities of war.
This is certainly one of my favorite/best books of the year... but (always the dreaded "but"!) what will likely stop it from being the top book of the year is that while there are literally more than a dozen of folks writing letters to and from each other (and much to Shaffer's credit this was rarely confusing), I found that while the characters of differing age and genders certainly had different personalities, they didn't have a unique "voice"... and while it didn't bother me while reading the book (and was something I only thought of in the post-reading digestion process) it is really my only quibble with the book.
But otherwise, this is one of those rare books that I feel I could recommend without (m)any reservation (now watch, I'll inspire someone to read it and they'll hate it!).
A sad postscript and an explanation for the dual authorship is that Shaffer died early this year, leaving her niece (Barrows) to put the finishing touches on for what now will be Shaffer's only novel and that she never did get to see the public or critical success of this book.
2008 1-2-3-4-5 Reading Challenge: + 276 Pages (Total: 10,530 pages - Finished: 11/23/2008)
-665 pages behind pace for the year (+107 change in pace since last book).
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