Sunday Survey

That’s weird. I read the NY Times bestsellers on paper this morning, and had various thoughts, but then I went online to double check before writing this, and they had next week’s bestsellers. A couple more click-throughs and I guess I could have had next year’s bestsellers. You’ve got to hand it to the Times. They don’t wait until the last minute.

Anyhow, new to the list this week is Private Games by James Patterson and Mark Sullivan. I was engaged in a discussion about Patterson a couple of weeks ago with some folks I was traveling with. One of them professed undying love of Patterson books; she couldn’t get enough of them. (The other person was reading Marjorie Morningstar, which to me was just a blast from the past that I would never have expected. It’s nice to see that Wouk is still being read.) I can appreciate Patterson fandom: you have certain expectations of a fast read, with lots of fun plot twists, and Patterson (and his co-writers) deliver. You know what to expect and you get it. Nothing wrong with that. And nothing wrong with wanting an easy, undemanding read, which certainly is part of the Patterson promise. The Sunday Times Book Review section, as always, is filled with ponderous looking articles about ponderous looking tomes, which is all well and good, but if you just want a little entertainment…

Also new to the list is Sophie Kinsella’s I’ve Got Your Number. I’ve read this one, and loved it. I’ve read all of Kinsella’s non-Shopaholic books, and loved them. What can I say? She’s funny and smart, and she crafts the perfect romantic comedies. What makes them perfect? They’re really romantic (like the scene here outside the hotel when our characters find each other for the first time) and they’re really comedic (for instance, our narrator heroine takes on the job of footnoting the text, as a nod to her academic prospective in-laws, who live and breathe footnotes, and the footnotes become the place where the fun happens if it just doesn’t happen to fit perfectly into the story). It’s too bad that Shopaholic wasn’t much of a hit as a film, because all of her non-S books would make spectacular movies, and in a world where romantic film comedies tend to be neither, maybe better source material might solve the problem. Then again, where would you find actors as good as the characters in Kinsella’s imagination? Oh, well. Read the book. It will do the job.

Other new books on the list are Anne Rice’s The Wolf Gift, in which apparently she moves on to werewolves as her latest subject. She’s a good writer, but Grinwout isn’t much of a werewolf fan as a general rule. Or vampires, or zombies, or whatever the chic monster du jour happens to be. But this is not intended as commentary on Rice, but rather on Grinwout, who just doesn’t keep up very well with what most people actually like.

The House I Loved looks interesting; I’ll have to check that one out back at the Day Job. It looks like our sort of book. (For the sake of full disclosure, the DJ will be using the Kinsella, by the way.) And finally there’s Robert Ludlum’s The Janson Command, by not Robert Ludlum. If werewolves, vampires and zombies are not Grinwout’s cup of tea, spy stories are barely in the coffee shop, so to speak. I never could understand Ludlum’s books when he was alive and writing them for himself: they were way too confusing for my tiny brain. Maybe he’s writing more clearly now that he’s dead. Or maybe his ghost (?) writer is. I'll leave that to others to decide.