So, as I said in a recent post, most of the movies I rent have something to do with music. This also goes for about half of the books I read. High Fidelity is a novel about a British audiophile who also owns a record store. Unlike the movie, which kind of portrays the main character (I forget his name- that's how sucky the book is) as a street savvy indie guy who collects rare Belle and Sebastian B-sides, this British guy goes gah-gah over weird Tina Turner LPs and stuff (?????). He's also annoyingly clueless about women and does horrible things to them, but still thinks it's their fault. Immature. Kind of a weenie. It's like- get it together! You're 30, not 21!Anyway, I quit reading it halfway through the book.
Some authors can create a character who you are supposed to hate. This wasn't one of those. Some authors can create a character who is pathetic and you start to love them because you are sympathetic to them. I think that's what Hornby tried to do, but he missed the mark. It's like when you're sitting next to somebody on the BART who is infringing on your personal space or something. Instead of sitting there and taking it, you get up and move to the next car at the next stop. So that's what I did. It's OK to just stop reading a crappy book.... or a book that just annoys you for that matter.
So I picked up a western detective novel that my friend Scott mailed me called "No Country For Old Men" by none other than Cormac McCarthy. A guy starts killing people with one of those blunt pnuematic hammers they slaughter cattle with in the first couple pages. Now that's a classic!
1 comment:
Hell yeah it is! Regardless of what one thinks of McCarthy, one can at least always be sure his work's free of spineless Tina Turner loving weenies, or at least if one ever appeared he'd be sure to get disembowled or decapitated in a page or two.
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