Wednesday Book Report

I haven't read a great book lately. I mean, a really great book. The last really great novel I read was They Came Like Swallows, by William Maxwell.

I've put down a few books lately without finishing them. Dancing in the Dark was one. I had high hopes for that one, but it turned out to be rather heavy-handed literary criticism for the most part.

So I turned to a fantasy novel I'd picked up at a library sale a while back (costing me a nickel per book or something like that): Talon of the Silver Hawk, by Raymond Feist. It was pretty awful, juvenile stuff. I might have liked I when I was fourteen, reading all those John Carter of Mars novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Still working on the stash of books I bought from the library book sale, I have now turned to Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt. This fantasy has what the Feist book did not, a fascinating story, and fine sentence-making. If I like this book in the end as much as I like its beginning, I'll be reading a lot more Robinson.

Finally, I sent for Tim Keller's King's Cross: The Story of the World in the Life of Jesus. Even just the title has me intrigued.