The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

Yet another book from the local farm – having read and really enjoyed The Almost Moon I had absolutely no doubts about buying The Lovely Bones, in particular considering it was a not-so-exorbitant 50p…

This is overall a very enjoyable read, though predictably at times fairly heart-breaking for a young father. When its magic tones are kept (relatively) in check it is really rather endearing – after all it reads like the daydream of a teenager who wishes she could be invisible in order to see how others behave without her. And the description of heaven is, for want of a better term, really “cute”.

The problem, for me, is when the aforementioned magic tones unleash their full power – I saw no need for Susie to come back to earth thanks to Ruth’s “gift”. Or maybe I’m just too much of a manly man: cause I don’t care about Susie being re-united in one way or another with Ray (I actually would have preferred for that not to happen) and I am kind of bothered by this mellow and romantic  scene, but man do I love seeing Shoeless Joe Jackson and his teammates come out of the corn in Field of Dreams…

Caos Calmo – Sandro Veronesi

I found a hardback edition of this Italian best-seller in the foreign-language section of Waterstones for 1£ - a few more finds like these and my National Book Tokens will last me a lifetime...

This novel is beautifully banal. Obviously everyone has a different way of dealing with the death of a lover. Obviously children are extremely resourceful. Obviously all families, even the ones that look picture-perfect from the outside, are messed up in one way or another (well, except for mine!). Obviously corporate greed is evil. Obviously people have their secrets.

And yet, for all its banality (and the dullness of many of its cultural reference-points), this book is extremely well-written and remarkably enjoyable.

That said, I would have preferred if the main character hadn’t started thinking that his dead lover was sending him post-mortem messages through Thom Yorke’s voice...

No One Writes to the Colonel – Gabriel García Márquez

Having been swept off of my feet after reading One Hundred Years of Solitude at age 16, almost immediately afterwards I jumped into No One Writes to the Colonel. Turns out, it was a rushed decision. Had I waited a little more, I probably would have enjoyed the book a lot more.

The sadness of the daily struggles of the colonel bored me when compared to the fascinating life of the other Colonel (with a capital C), Buendía. Yet, I now think that the book would have deserved something better than a couple of hours of distracted reading in my house’s “thinking room” (a room so tiny that one couldn’t do anything other than thinking – yet one with such a magnificent view over the Piedmontese hills and mountains that one just couldn’t turn it into a store room).

A friend of mine (probably too lazy to read One Hundred Years of Solitude, but sufficiently smart to realize that reading was actually potentially cool)  kept on quoting the last line of the book and constantly praised the novel. I never thought the last line of No One Writes to the Colonel was particularly good or funny, but I now think that maybe the book does deserve more credit than what I initially gave it.