Books for October

In Books, Reading on 22 October 2009 with no comments

I did a lousy job read­ing this month, pri­mar­ily because I was run­ning around like a mad­man try­ing to launch my own web­site on time. Oh well. There’s always next month.

Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro.
I admit that I’m not the most patient reader on the planet. I don’t expect nov­els to get to the point right away, but if you don’t get me really hooked within the first 50 pages chances are not good I’m going ot stick around. But because this book came so highly rec­om­mended, I gave it until the halfway mark before decid­ing it was never going to get any bet­ter. I already knew what the book was about (and if you don’t, and decide to read this, make sure you don’t look at the CIP data, which totally ruins it for you) so I skipped ahead look­ing for the “good parts”, some­thing to make the book worth slog­ging through. I didn’t find any. I won’t say I hated this book, but I will say I couldn’t even almost fin­ish it.

Emperor of Scent, by Chandler Burr.
It might be that I’m biased because I love per­fume, but I doubt it. This book is sim­ply won­der­ful. Although non­fic­tion, it reads like a novel. It’s funny, it’s engag­ing, it’s fast-paced, it’s gen­er­ous. It’s part sci­ence, yes, but it’s also part biog­ra­phy. I found that after the first 10 or so pages I could not put the book down — I had to know what hap­pened next. I became obsessed with Luca Turin and what was going to hap­pen with him, and after I fin­ished the book I had to look him up on the inter­net to find out more. The book was just that good. Loved it.

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