BOOk report

Last night, I had a lovely time with Mrs. Carrot, David, Cathy and Toddie at the Fascist Queer Mall. We had a small nosh @ Panera’s and then a walk around the mall. Mostly we harassed the sales people in Dillards…

After I asked Mrs. C what she was reading, I came to the distinct understanding that reading – picking a book and committing to it – is a very personal act. If you are a true bibliophile, you have your own personal reasons for picking the books you read.

That being said, here are my two most recent reviews:

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by JK Rowling

OK, honestly, I reread it because I am just stoked for the new movie and I was having trouble waiting. Dead honest truth!

Up until this newest Potter book (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince), I always thought Goblet of Fire (GOF) was my favorite Potter book. But both of these books are so good, I would have a hard time picking one over the other.

And, honestly, people, I should hate this sort of magical gobbledygook. But Harry Potter has great characters and fun, imaginative plots.

GOF concerns Harry’s 4th year at Hogwarts, where the school is sponsoring an international magic contest called the Triwizard Tournament Though the contestants are supposed to be 17 to compete; 14-year-old Harry has his name pop out of the fiery Goblet of the Aforementioned Title. Because this piece of dishware is magic, Harry is mystically bound and required to compete. There are three different, very dangerous contests Harry has to slog through.

And that’s probably the main reason this book is more interesting to me than the first three. It seemed for the first few books, everything in the plot seemed to “Potter” along, introducing a point or event at random, until the end of the school year, where everything would culminate in something requisitely dramatic. In GOF, the three contest events – spread through out the school year – tend to drive the plot more. Also, Harry is starting to date girls, which is fun to read about all the angst teenagers have to go through (as we thank God we got past it). Finally, GOF finally starts to realize and show the incredible darkness and creepiness the other stories have only hinted to.

The Dark by James Herbert

For several years, Herbert was the Stephen King of England. This book scared the bloody Hell out of me as an 11-year –old; I found it for 25 cents recently at a yard sale, so I thought I’d give it another spin.

I should have “put away childish things”, as The Diary of My Personal Lord and Savior Jesus Christ says.

Herbert wrote The Fog also. The Dark is just a redux of the same plot. Except this one has a Jim Jones-like cult (it was written in 1980) and a shadowy darkness that causes the same bloodshed, insanity, and mayhem that the Fog does. And instead of a small island in Maine, the whole of London goes crazy and kills each other. There is the same granola-nut-crunch ending. There are the same pages and pages of physical battle for life and death with very little dialogue thrown in to break up the ridiculously dense paragraphs. There are the same crushingly dull characters. There are the same bad clichéd lines.

These books are terribly dated now. The writing seems utilitarian at best, and the mysticism was just not engaging. Most of all, it wasn’t scary. There’s nothing there in the dark that isn’t there in the daylight, except in The Dark, you’re more likely to be bored to death…