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The Body Artist by Don DeLillo
I finished this one a week or two ago, but I had to let my brain digest it for a while.
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Jasper Fforde, you sly fucking bastard, sneaking your own book into the well of lost plots. I was wondering what you were up to with those striking nursery rhyme characters.
Life seems perfect for Thursday Next. She’s just gotten married to the love of her life, saved the world from Acheron Hades, improved Jane Eyre, and basically ended the Crimean war, which has been going on for about 150 years.
The basic differences between our world and the alternative history are as follows: The Crimean War has been going on for over 150 years, Wales is an independent republic, Shakespeare is hotly debated by everyone (and appreciated in various capacities), riots break out over art, and some people have a natural gift for time travel.
Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler was…a decent story just adequately written.
The fourth installment of Douglas Adam’s Increasingly Inaccurately Named Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy, So Long and Thanks for all the fish, gets its name from the long debate of who is smarter, humans or dolphins. Humans believe they are smarter because they came out of the sea and onto land and don’t spend all of their time swimming and mucking about. Dolphins believe they are superior for just the opposite.
Readers of books one and two of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series know the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. What they don’t know, is the question.
Literally. The eponymous restaurant is at the end of the Universe. But not in the way you might think. It doesn’t back up against some sort of brick wall or worm hole out in space. It is at the end, as in when the Universe ceases to be. Kablooey. Nada. No more. The End.
This book, the whole series, in fact, but particularly this book, is very near and dear to me. I spent months lying on library floors, contemplating how its genre, vision, and style hold up a mirror to the time in which it was written. When most people chose classics for our A.P. English term-paper, I chose H2G2.
For the last 48 hours or so, I’ve put most of my life on hold, functioning only perfunctorily, in order to read this book. There’s several things that I liked about right off the bat: It takes place in West Michigan and Chicago, the characters are punk rock intelligentsia, and the narrative in prickled with musical and literary references. But most of all, it’s a love story that I was compellingly drawn to, and able to relate.