Author Archives: Kinsey

Troubled Waters

by Kinsey

Last week I read A Visit From the Good Squad, Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, and it was fine. It was well-written and had a very interesting structure (moving back and forth between characters and time periods) and the famous chapter told in PowerPoint slides was quite affecting. But everyone in the book seemed miserable and my main reaction was to wonder if most people in the world are really that unhappy, because I am not and most of the people I know aren’t. Are all the sad, mean people just clustering together in literary novels? So while I would be happy to discuss Goon Squad more in the comments if anyone else has read it, what I want to talk about instead is the next book I read, Troubled Waters by Sharon Shinn.

I love Sharon Shinn. When I’m poking around on Amazon or on my library’s catalog and realize that she has a new book coming out, I have been know to let out a little squeal of happiness. Her books generally follow a predictable pattern–they are virtually all fantasy stories in which a strong female lead character has to overcome some of obstacle and falls in love along the way. There are often royal families involved, and magic, the characters generally have to come to understand and embrace the powers they have. But don’t think I’m complaining about the books all having mostly the same plot–they’re great! There’s action and romance and excitement and well-drawn characters, and I know that I am going to be satisfied and will enjoy every minute. There’s also a nice feminist foundation underneath it all. The books aren’t explicitly about women overcoming their oppression by men but you get the clear sense that the author is a feminist, and her female characters are fully-realized people.

It can be tricky to figure out where to start with Shinn’s books, because she’s written a ton. There’s a series of middle-reader books that starts with The Safe-Keeper’s Secret, which are fine but a little young for my tastes, and a number of stand-alone books including a futuristic re-telling of Jane Eyre. But the ones I love, and where I would recommend someone start, are the Samaria series and the Twelve Houses books. These are both multi-book series set in two different universes. The Samaria books are about, well, angels. I don’t want to give too much away, but that series has a slightly more sci-fi twist and includes some entertaining Biblical references, even though it is really not at all religious. The Twelve Houses books are a little more traditional fantasy stories about kings and queens and knights and magicians, but I find them nicely grounded with a focus on the people involved and their emotions. I vastly prefer these kinds of stories when they are told on this smaller scale, especially when compared to Game of Thrones-esque enormous epics that seem more interested in the politics rather than the people.

Now that I’ve got all that explained, Troubled Waters isn’t in either of those series, but I’m hoping it’s the start of a new one. It’s the story of Zoe, a young girl who lives with her father in a tiny village far from the capital of her land. When her father dies (which happens on about page 2, no spoilers), one of the leaders of the country appears to take her back to the capital so she can marry the king, and things all spin off from there. There is royal intrigue and magic and a love story and I found the whole thing just charming. The conceit of of the magic in this book is that it is centered around the elements. Zoe has a particular affinity for water, but it feels like Shinn is setting things up for additional books to follow stories of the other elements. As you can probably tell from how brief my review is, Troubled Waters is not breaking any new ground, but I will happily read as many books about this world as Shinn wants to write.

The Song of Achilles

by Kinsey

I just finished up some work travel, during which I seemed to have terrible reading luck and suffered through one bad book choice after another–overly-dense historical non-fiction, some ridiculous self-help that made me roll my eyes, etc. Luckily, I finally hit a good one and The Song of Achilles entertained me through the last little stretch of  waiting out summer thunderstorms in various airports.

Written by Madeleine Miller, it tells the story of Achilles, the great Greek warrior who led Greek troops in the Trojan War and was (spoilers!) ultimately killed by one of the princes of Troy. Now, there are certainly plenty of stories out there about the Trojan War, including The Iliad, if you’re in the mood for some epic poetry. The twist in this one is that the narrator is Patroclus, a young Greek prince who is exiled from his home and raised with Achilles. Patroclus is right there alongside Achilles as he is taught by a centaur and fights the Trojans and moves through all the other relevant bits of Greek mythology. And in Miller’s version of the story they become lovers and life partners.

After I finished the book I reviewed some of the stories of Achilles on-line, and it’s clear that Miller did a tremendous amount of research. The book includes references to some very minor points of mythology and even touches on how stories change over time (that whole Achilles heel thing only came up in later stories, so it doesn’t come into play here). If you’ve read any of Marian Zimmer Bradley’s modern retellings of story of King Arthur or Troy, this book won’t seem all that revolutionary–Miller’s not striking any new ground here by putting a new spin on a classic story. And it looks like that there has long been scholarly debate about the nature of the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, so even that aspect of the book is based in history. However, the writing is refreshingly crisp and straightforward and the action moved quickly. Even knowing the basic structure of the story, I was whipping through the book as fast as I could, desperate to find out what would happen next. It was a perfect book to keep my attention while smushed in an airplane seat.

And just this week this book won the 2012 Orange Prize, the British award that “celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing from throughout the world,” so apparently this book is even more well-regarded than I thought. (Plus, the chair of the judges this year for the Orange Prize was Joanna Trollope, who I also love–go read The Rector’s Wife!)

Blood, Bones & Butter

by Kinsey

I like memoirs and I read a lot of them. Some of them work better than others. Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef by Gabrielle Hamilton is not going to go to the very top of my list, but it a solid book and an enjoyable read. Plus, trying to figure out why I didn’t like it more than I did helped me figure out exactly why I like some memoirs better than others, which could certainly help my future book selections.

Hamilton is the very respected chef at Prune, a very respected restaurant in New York’s East Village. (I’ve never been there, but the menu sure looks good.) There are about a million and one chef’s memoirs out there, but this one at least offers a change from the standard culinary school story, since Hamilton took a much more circuitous route to restaurant ownership. She roughly divides her story into three parts that echo the title. The Blood section deals with her childhood and her family, who sound fun but wildly dysfunctional. Personally, I don’t like reading about people’s childhoods and found the first section of this book a real slog–I honestly wasn’t sure I was even going to keep reading. But Hamilton leaves homes as a teenager and moves to New York City, and things pick up from there. In Bones, she describes how she wandered through work in large-scale catering houses and through an MFA program before opening her restaurant and I found all of that fascinating. (Her stories about the catering world also explain a lot of things about the meals I ate a conference recently.) Finally, Butter deals with her marriage, kids and, in-laws. Sound pretty standard? Well, she’s a lesbian who marries an Italian man so he can get his green card (sort of?), has kids, and then falls in love with his mother and the annual trip to Italy to visit her husband’s family. So, not so standard. There were a lot of things in Butter that felt very glossed over to me–she talks in depth about the affair she had with the Italian before they married, but hardly mentions even in passing how they choose to have multiple children–but Italy sure does sound nice. I might have married the guy for those in-laws myself.

So what insight about memoirs did this book lead me to? That memoirs work better when they are structured around something very specific. My favorite two memoirs of recent years were Eat, Pray, Love and Julie & Julia. I think those work well because they both use a particular activity or time period as a framework for the story, such as Julie Powell spending a year cooking her way through one of Julia Child’s cookbooks. This prevents the memoir from falling into a patten in which the author just basically describes everything that has happened from the time they were born up until the present. In Julie & Julia, no matter what tangents she goes off on or what she chooses to discuss, I know that the book is going to come back to what she’s cooking and that it’s going to end when the year is up. In Blood, Bones & Butter, Hamilton does use the three title ingredients to create a structure, but it’s limited–I actually didn’t figure out how the sections were divided until after I had finished the book. And the real weakness of the everything-up-until-now method of writing a memoir is that things often just sort of stop when the author reaches the current day.  I definitely felt that way with this book and would really like to hear the rest of Hamilton’s story. I am aware that when someone is writing the story of their life, that story may not have a classic narrative arc. That’s why I think the very explicit structure of something like Eat, Pray, Love works so well. As a reader, I want for there to be a conclusion of some sort, and putting a frame of time or concept around the story helps provide that. Blood, Bones & Butter is an interesting and well-written book–maybe it is to its credit that my main issue with it is that I wanted to hear more of the story.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

by Kinsey

Why did I think that The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society was a feisty-woman story like The Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood? Why, based on nothing but the title, did I decide that this was one of those books that would be beloved by art teachers and your mom’s friends and the women on the View? I’ve done this before, enough times that I could probably start tagging posts How My Vague and Uninformed Impressions of Books I Haven’t Read Are Completely Wrong. I have no idea where I got my Ya-Ya impression, but this is not one of those books. I avoided it for years but when I finally read it, almost by accident while trapped on a plane, I loved it.

Okay, here’s what this book is actually about: during World War II the Germans occupied the Channel Islands, which are these tiny little islands that lie between England and France. They’re part of the British Commonwealth, but not technically part of the United Kingdom–I think of them as sort of like the British Puerto Rico. Anyway, during the war the British government didn’t have the resources/chose not to defend them, so the Germans moved in early in the war and assumed that this would be their first step towards occupying England. That obviously didn’t happen, but the people who lived on the islands spent nearly five years under German rule and were not allowed to have any communication with the outside world during that time. This story takes place after the war and occupation have ended when a young London writer, looking for something new and meaningful to do, starts corresponding with a group of islanders. She encourages her new friends to tell their stories about life under the occupation, but she also gets caught up in their present-day activities and her own efforts to move on from the war.

As a WWII history nerd, I appreciated reading about a bit of the war that I didn’t know much about, and I am fascinated by the post-war period in Britain, so I liked that part as well. In the U.S. we tend to think of the late 1940s and into the 1950s as boom years, but those were very austere times in Britain. Sugar was rationed until 1953! Meat until 1954! It was a whole different world and I think this book nicely captures the mixed feeling people had at the time–thrilled that the war was over, but tired and a little overwhelmed by the rebuilding. But this isn’t really a typical WW II book–overall, it ends up being more charming than traumatic. First, since it takes place after the war has ended, you hear about what people experienced but you’re not living it with them–there’s a sense of remove. And second, the book is told in epistolary format, meaning that the whole thing is made up of letters and telegrams sent back and forth between the various characters, so it’s got this sort of delightfully chatty style. More than anything else it reminds me of 84, Charing Cross Road, another British post-WWII epistolary story. (If you’ve never read 84, Charing Cross Road, forgot all this other stuff and go read it immediately. It’s wonderful, and if nothing else it can serve as an example of how astoundingly much our world has changed in 60 years.) Look, Nazis are Nazis and there are definitely upsetting parts in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, but I felt hopeful when I finished this book and that is something than can be hard to find.

Wonderstruck

by Kinsey

I think I’ve said here before that I don’t like graphic novels–I respect them as an art form, I respect those who read them, but no matter how I try, they’re just not for me. Wonderstruck may be an exception to the rule, partly because it’s half a graphic novel and half a regular novel. The illustrated story follows a deaf girl living in New York City in the 1930s, while the written story follows a little boy in Minnesota in the 1970s, and the narrative moves back and forth between the two. Without giving away too much, the joy of the book is watching how these stories parallel each other and move closer and closer together, until they ultimately intertwine. The drawings are fairly simple black and white pencil drawings (I think? I am so artistically-challenged that Draw Something is beyond me, so who knows what someone with art knowledge would call these) but they’re beautiful and very evocative. And a lot of the book is set is New York City and I’ve mentioned how much I like reading about New York.

Brian Selznick also wrote The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which the movie Hugo was based on, and when I was reading Wonderstruck a school librarian stopped to rave about how good it was, and how good the Hugo book was, and I how I should see the Hugo movie, etc. I feel like school librarians see lots of books, so I should listen when they say something is worth my time.

I should say here that Wonderstruck is more of a middle reader than a young adult book–it’s aimed at pretty young kids. So although the book looks giant and long, it took me less than two hours to read, so don’t go expecting something at The Hunger Games level. It’s not that complex, which is probably why I don’t have too much to say about it, but it was cute and charming and it served a a nice break from some of the heavier, Nazi-filled things I’ve been reading lately.

The Hare with the Amber Eyes

by Kinsey

I can’t believe that I haven’t already written about The Hare with the Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss. I loved it so much I was sure that I had written a review of it, but it must have slipped between the cracks, which I cannot allow to happen. This book has been all over the place lately so I know I’m not exactly letting you in on a secret with this recommendation, but sometimes books are popular for a good reason. This is a non-fiction family memoir written by an English ceramics artist whose family was one of the richest, most powerful Jewish banking families in Europe in the 19th century. He traces the history of his family as they climbed to the top of European society, and then were devastated by two World Wars and the anti-Semitism that was always waiting just under the surface of polite society.  (As I said to my sister when I was about 2/3rds of the way through the book, “This has been really enjoyable so far, but now it’s 1930 and they’re Jews in Austria. I feel like things are about to take a turn.”)

There are plenty of WWII memoirs out there–what makes this one stand out is that the story is all told in the context of the family’s art. Specifically, de Waal traces a collection of small Japanese carvings known as netsuke–how his family obtained them, how they fit into the rest of the family’s collection, and how they survived the twists and turns of history to end up in his possession. Political events are a major part of the story, but even those are filtered through the lens of how they affected the family’s patronage and collection of art. The book is more art history than history, and it makes what is a familiar story feel fresh and interesting. One thing did puzzle me: the book did not include any pictures of the netsuke. Lengthy, lengthy descriptions of the tiny carvings and pictures of the family, but no pictures of the carvings themselves. That seems like it must be a deliberate decision, to make sure that the readers’ focus is on the family and the people instead of on the things, even though the fate of the netsuke is the hook the entire book is based around. I ended up going to Wikipedia to find out what these things actually looked like, and then falling down an internet-rabbit hole about Japanese art. If you’d like to see some very detailed pictures of netsuke, let me recommend JapaneseNetsuke as a starting point.

Also, although I linked to the Amazon page, I would recommend not reading the reviews there before you read the book, because they give away some of the major twists. I’m not someone who gets overly concerned about spoilers, but I went into this book blind and I think that especially well.  I knew that the netsuke collection survived the wars, but I learned how that happened as the author did, and I think that made the experience more powerful. It can be hard when reading history to remember that the things that happened in the past were not inevitable or destined, but that life at those moment in the past was just as fluid and unpredictable for the people living it as our lives feel today. Having only a general sense of what was going to happen made following the story of this one family, and this one collection of tiny objects, feel like a thriller.

Angelology by Danielle Trussoni

by Kinsey

In my last post I mentioned how much I liked my book-a-day calendar, but I didn’t say that one of my favorite parts of the calendar is its tiny book reviews. The pages on those calendars are small so they only get a couple of lines to describe each recommendation, but they do a great job capturing the essence of the book. For example, the calendar said that Angelology was like a cross between Dan Brown and Umberto Eco, and that is a great description.

The premise of Angelology is that the angels of biblical times took human wives, resulting a race of divine beings called Nephilim who live amongst humans. But these are not happy guardian-type angels–the Nephilim have no souls and have been manipulating and oppressing humanity for centuries. Angelologists (a word I’m glad I could just read and didn’t have to say out loud) are the scholars and adventurers who dedicate their lives to fighting the Nephilim’s efforts to exterminate humanity. Oddly, their efforts seem to involve a lot of research in Latin. Two stories run in parallel throughout the book–a modern-day tale of a young nun and a historian trying to unravel a mystery, and a series of flashbacks to a story of angelologists working in Nazi-occupied France. Angelology is far better written than a Dan Brown book, but it does have that element of trying to solve a mystery through the use of medieval relics.

Things I particularly liked about the book:

1) Trussoni creates a very complete world where the existence of angels has been smoothly worked into historical reality.

2) The WWII characters were compelling and the descriptions of Vichy France were fascinating.

3) Most of the modern-day story takes place in New York City, which I really like reading about.

4) Depending on how you read it, the ending was open-ended in a way I found satisfying and true to a complex story.

Things I did not like:

1) The book was long. It felt long. I suspect a good editor could have cut 100 pages out without losing a thing.

2) The modern-day characters seemed flat to me–the young nun, in particular, felt really implausible.

3) There were a number of things about the Nephilim world that didn’t really make since to me. Like, they have servants from lesser angelic classes that are never really explained? And I guess that the Nephilim’s ultimate goal is to completely exterminate humanity, but they don’t seem to be working towards that end with much enthusiasm (despite a relationship with the Nazis). I said that the world felt complete, and it does, but the more I think about it the more cracks appeared around the edges.

4) Depending on how you read it, the ending set things up for a sequel and I feel like I’ve read enough about these people and don’t need another book.

This wasn’t a perfect book, but it was interesting and ambitious. And I’d far rather read a flawed, ambitious book than a technically-adept dull book.

Siren of the Waters

by Kinsey

One of my Christmas presents from my father this year was one of those page-a-day calendars. But instead of cartoons or a new German phrase each day (last year’s gift, which was awesome because instead of normal, touristy phrases, it included things like, “The sword was sharp and dangerous.”) this one recommends a book each day. If you’re wondering how this calendar could possibly appeal to everyone, the answer is that is throws in a little of everything. So far, it has recommended that I read Howard’s End, that Andre Agassi autobiography, and a non-fiction book about maps. I suspect that if you read all its books you would have an impressively wide array of knowledge and would be a killer Jeopardy player. I have no intention of reading all of these random books because I am super-picky about what I read (see also: why I am not in any book clubs), but each week there’s usually one thing interesting enough that I pin that day to my bulletin board, which is becoming a sort of messy to-read list. The first of the page-a-day books I have finished so far is Siren of the Waters by Michael Genelin.

Siren of the Waters is the first book in the Jana Matinova detective series. Jana is a detective in Slovakia, but she started her career in the police force in communist Czechoslovakia. While there is a traditional murder mystery driving the plot, the real heart of the book is in the descriptions of life under communist rule. The story is set in the modern day but features extensive flashbacks that show how the communist state dictated Jana’s professional life and crushed her family, and how only the well-timed fall of the Czechoslovakian government allowed her to continue in her career. The book is not touchy-feely in any way, so it doesn’t get into Jana’s emotions about all of this, but it does show the incredible level of change that ordinary people had to deal with as Iron Curtain fell. Part of the book also takes place in France, so there’s also some discussion of the tensions in the European Union as the poorer, more corrupt former communist states try to integrate themselves into the European community. I’m afraid that I’ve made this sound like an especially dull issue of The Economist, and it’s not at all. There is plenty of murder and intrigue to keep things moving along, but the book also shows how people’s everyday lives continue to be affected by the country’s political history

I found Siren of the Waters a little too bleak for me. Mystery is a genre that is so finely divided into sub-genres that you can pinpoint exactly what level of gore and darkeness you’d like to read about, and while I am not quite at the level of reading about mysteries solved by knitting circles (totally a thing), I prefer something a little less soul-crushing than this. But sometimes mystery series pick up the pace once all the scene-setting of the first book is done, so I might check out the second Jana Matinova book. It’s definitely an interesting way to learn some Eastern European history.

Jennifer Weiner

by Kinsey

I mentioned in a comment on Anna’s post on A Reliable Wife that I should talk about how much I love Jennifer Weiner on Twitter, so let me do that now: I love Jennifer Weiner on Twitter. Weiner is a best-selling author who has been publishing up a storm for the last 10 years or so, and I really enjoyed her first two books, Good in Bed and In Her Shoes. Her later books haven’t done much for me–although I am 99% sure I’ve read all of them I cannot remember the title, plot, or anything else about anything past those first two. Regardless, I think that Weiner is one of the smartest writers out there and I hang on her every tweet. I have the sense that writers today are expected to be on social media and interact with people online as part of their marketing strategy, whether they enjoy it or not. Weiner does social media better than any other writer I’ve seen and she always seems to be having a good time, whether she’s talking about going to the gym or gender discrimination in book reviews.

Weiner certainly spends time on Twitter talking about her kids and live-tweeting The Bachelor (her Bachelor tweets are way more entertaining than the show itself), but she also manages to talk about some very complicated issues in the publishing industry in 140-character chunks. For example, the easiest way to classify Weiner would be to call her a “chick lit” writer, but that’s a loaded word. Saying that something is chick lit immediately conjures up the image of a pink book with shoes on the cover, and a silly story about a silly young woman falling in love in a cute way. The word also has the whiff of bad writing about it. Weiner has addressed this issue head on and has been one of the strongest female voices pointing out the women who write about relationships are disparaged as “chick lit” while men who write about relationships are commenting on modern life. (Example: why wasn’t One Day considered chick lit? If that had been written by a woman, I promise you it would have had a pink cover.) She also argues that books can be well-written but fun at the same time, and points out when authors speak down to their readers by implying that anyone not interested in serious, weighty, depressing modern literary novels written by men is just an uncultured dolt. (She is the one who coined the Twitter phrase “franzenfreuede,” in honor of a much-celebrated writer who seems to have a fair amount of disdain for the reading public.) I always get the sense that Weiner respects her readers, and that she is willing to fight for respect for her work and for the people who enjoy it.

Following Weiner on Twitter is also a good way to keep up on publishing world gossip. She came up in the first place because she’s had an on-going discussion on Twitter about Fifty Shades of Grey, which started as Twilight fanfic. She’s raised a lot of interesting questions about who owns characters and how much authors are (both legally and morally) required to acknowledge when they are inspired by someone else. Weiner also points out the blatant sexism in the New York Times (and other) book reviews, showing how male authors get multiple reviews and glowing profiles while female authors get ignored. She gets a surprising amount of crap for some of these stands, but seems to handle all the flack with a good deal of grace.

Plus, I saw her do a reading once and she was adorable and her husband and baby were there, and they were adorable, and I generally just sort of wanted to be her friend. And while that may not mean I am going to love all her books (although both the book and the movie versions of In Her Shoes are both quite good), I can wholeheartedly recommend keeping up with her on Twitter. She’s fun and smart, and following her makes me feel more fun and smarter.

That’s not funny

by Kinsey

I hate writing negative reviews of books. There are so many awesome books out there that I would far rather spend my time and words directing people to things I think they would love. Plus, a lot of times the books that I don’t like aren’t bad, exactly, they just didn’t work for me. So rather than a negative review, let’s consider this more of a question about why I am sometimes so out of sync with what other people think.

I recently finished The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman, which is essentially a series of interlocking short stories about the staff members of an international newspaper based in Rome. The paper is in the process of going out of business, and the book tracks both how the paper came to be and how the staff members are dealing with its slow decline. The book got wonderful reviews, many of which mentioned its humor. The New York Times Books Review called it “alternately hilarious and heart-wrenching.” Janet Maslin in the New York Times said it was “smartly satirical yet brimming with affection.” When you look at the reviews on the Amazon page, you get a lot of big-name publications using words like “funny” and “charming,” saying that you’ll laugh and cry, etc. I thought it was horrible. Not badly written, I actually think it was very well-written. But I found it heart-breaking and full of awful people,  plus some good people that awful things happen to. I only kept reading because I assumed that somehow things were going to get better and the book would resolve in a satisfying way. Instead, the things that happened to these characters got worse and worse until the very end when I had to remind myself very sternly that these were all imaginary people and there was no reason to let the horrible things that happened to them ruin my day. I wish I could pull an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and remove the memory of this book from my brain, I found it that upsetting. Again, I’m not saying this was a bad book–it clearly had a huge impact on me. But not every book is for every person and I long ago decided that books about the small tragedies of everyday life are just Not For Me. What is baffling me here is the number of people who seem to consider this book funny. There was nothing in this book that I thought was funny. There were things that the characters seemed to think were funny, but my reaction to that was that those characters were horrible people for laughing at the pain of others.

I had a similar experience with The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall. Reviews for this called it “uproarious,” “entertaining,” and “funny.” But I should have paid way more attention to the words like “bittersweet,” because then maybe I would have realized that the book would just make me feel bitter, minus the sweet. The title here is pretty self-explanatory, but this is a novel about a guy with multiple wives who is struggling to keep all of them happy and support his family. Again, I found nothing funny here. The only things that I can imagine someone else might find funny just made me cringe because they seemed to be drawing humor from the fact that the characters were not happy or successful and would never be happy or successful. I went in expecting something at least somewhat witty or entertaining and ended up despairing about how we all just die alone and there’s no point in even trying to talk to any one else since it will all only go terribly wrong.

I don’t expect every book out there to make me laugh–I do recognize that the point of some books it to tell a sad story or to point out more poignant aspects of life. And I am fine with a sad book. One of the best things I have read in recent years was The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak and that made me sob and sob on the train like a crazy person. What I find odd is when I read these reviews that say that I will laugh and cry, and I can’t even see why anyone would ever laugh. When sources I trust repeatedly refer to the humor in a book, I don’t expect that book to leave me feeling horrible about myself, and the people in the book, and humanity in general, which is how I felt after both of these. Considering how far off my reactions to these books seem to be from the norm, I can only assume that I have some sort of enormous comedic blind spot.

Have you read either of these books? Did you like them? And more importantly, did you think they were funny?