A Good Week

My reading kind of goes in cycles. I'm always reading something, but sometimes I hit a rough patch where the books aren't the greatest or the material is slow going and dry. Other times I hit it big, with one fantastic book coming on the heels of another, or several others. This past week and a half has been the latter. I have two books to thank for that.

Crossing to Safety, by Wallace Stegner

I got this book as a gift from a professor 5 or 6 years ago. I remember thanking my professor politely at the time but thinking something along the lines of "um...we'll see." I didn't know much about the author and the story description didn't sound all that compelling - the friendship between two couples over the course of a lifetime. Eh.

I finally pulled it off the shelf last week, and was engrossed almost from the very beginning. Wallace Stegner is a beautiful, quietly-skilled writer who takes a long chain of fireworkless events and makes them add up to the most moving story you can imagine. I loved all four of the central characters, for their strengths and dependencies as well as their full-bodied development. I loved the themes he was working with. I loved, well, I loved everything. When someone asks me what's so great about The Sopranos I answer, "everything. Every single thing is done well." The same thing applies here.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon

I picked this book up at the book cart at work - people donate books and my organization sells them in the lobby for a quarter apiece. A quarter! I'm not actually finished with it yet - I've still got about 1/5 of it to go. The first 4/5 have been incredible, though. Two cousins in New York in the late 1930s. Both Jewish, one recently smuggled out of Czechoslovakia. Together they create The Escapist, a beloved comic book hero. That's just where the book starts, actually. It goes on to all sorts of places - strength and its limitations, the power of our own creations, the distance between fathers and sons, escape - both from ourselves and other places... man. So good.

Is Reading Rainbow still on? Does it still do book reviews? I feel like I need to give LeVar Burton a call.