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A review by yhtgrace
Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon
2.0
So I read this book because a) there's a movie, and Downey Jr.'s in it, and that's always a good reason to watch a movie, b) it's by Michael Chabon, who wrote The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, c) this review from Goodreads which had the following quote:
By the end of that brilliantly written paragraph I'd fallen in love with Sara (because you know, she totally understands that awful sinking feeling you get when you're on a bus and there's another hour to go but you've finished the book in your hand and you don't have another one in your bag and oh no what is there to do for an hour?).
But then I did read the book, and I hated the main character, and also the entire supporting cast, which was awful, because how much I like a book often has a lot to do with how much I like the characters (see [b:The Great Gatsby|4671|The Great Gatsby|F. Scott Fitzgerald|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1340163129s/4671.jpg|245494], another fine example of a book with a whole crew of characters that I had the uncontrollable urge to kill with fire) and so despite Chabon's flaw-free writing, I strong disliked Wonders Boys, too. If Chabon wasn't so excellent at stringing words together I'd probably have given up on the book really early on.
Bonus! Other stuff I highlighted in the book:
"Sara would read anything you handed her--Jean Rhys, Jean Shepherd, Jean Genet--at a steady rate of sixty-five pages an hour, grimly and unsparingly and without apparent pleasure. She read upon waking, sitting on the toilet, stretched out in the backseat of the car. When she went to the movies she took a book with her, to read before the show began, and it was not unusual to find her standing in front of the microwave, with a book in one hand and a fork in the other, heating a cup of noodle soup while she read, say, At Lady Molly's for the third time (she was a sucker for series and linked novels). If there was nothing else she would consume all the magazines and newspapers in the house--reading, to her, was a kind of pyromania--and when these ran out she would reach for insurance brochures, hotel prospectuses and product warranties, advertising circulars, sheets of coupons. Once I had come upon the spectacle of Sara, finished with a volume of C. P. Snow while only partway through one of the long baths she took for her bad back, desperately scanning the label on a bottle of Listerine."
By the end of that brilliantly written paragraph I'd fallen in love with Sara (because you know, she totally understands that awful sinking feeling you get when you're on a bus and there's another hour to go but you've finished the book in your hand and you don't have another one in your bag and oh no what is there to do for an hour?).
But then I did read the book, and I hated the main character, and also the entire supporting cast, which was awful, because how much I like a book often has a lot to do with how much I like the characters (see [b:The Great Gatsby|4671|The Great Gatsby|F. Scott Fitzgerald|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1340163129s/4671.jpg|245494], another fine example of a book with a whole crew of characters that I had the uncontrollable urge to kill with fire) and so despite Chabon's flaw-free writing, I strong disliked Wonders Boys, too. If Chabon wasn't so excellent at stringing words together I'd probably have given up on the book really early on.
Bonus! Other stuff I highlighted in the book:
"She was a natural blonde, with delicare hands and feet, and in her youthful photographs one saw a girl with mocking eyes and a tragic smile, the course of whose life would conspire in time to transpose that pair of adjectives."
"I had known plenty of movie lovers in my life, from imaginary drag queens who idolized the great female faces to nostalgia addicts who climbed into a movie as into a time machine or a bottle of whiskey and set the dial for "never come back"; and to one degree or another the obsession, like all obsessions, implied a certain windy emptiness within.