Ok, really, once a week

So I said once a week and then I lost my blog.  But Alison told me how to find it again and here I am.

This week:
Jonathan Franzen -- Freedom
 I read this on an endless flight to and from San Francisco.  Everyone who says it is readability is right -- while the characters are depressed/depressing and capable of making some of the world's worst (yet completely ordinary) life choices, the book has a nice flow.  I started out truly disliking Patty -- but the book does a good job of telling her story from enough standpoints that you can see not only why but how she ended up where she does.  Her son is about as unlikeable a human being as I have read about, and does little to challenge my dislike of a certain privileged shit of a white boy, and little is endearing in Patty's refusal to see her son for the shot that he is (and his supposed redepmption is unbeleivable as is his continued marriage to the blank slate girl next door. 

Michael Grant --Gone
Totally misleading and fairly stupid.  All the adults disappear -- kids left alone, what will they do??  I hate fantasy that pretends to be science fiction.  What seemed as if it should be a good young adult postapocalyptic account is instead some sort of supernatural nonsense with  a little Hobbes and a lot of Lord of the Flies.

Currently re-reading
Mary-Doria Russell -- The Sparrow
so every few years or so I change the book that I reread most often.  When I was in college it was John Irving's World according to Garp, then there was a grad school gap when I stopped reading ....I was going to say for pleasure, but that is not quite right...I guess I just stopped reading fiction.  Then when I started reading novels again it was almost anything by David Lodge.  And then A.S Byatt's Babel Tower.  So Now I am in a Sparrow, Children of God repeat.  But I'll have to blog about that when I finish this re-read.