Two More for March

In the remainder of March I ripped through two books.

The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland, and The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold.

The Gum Thief seems to be about par for the course for Coupland from what I've read. Weird characters who are almost unlikeable but somehow it feels like a betrayal to dislike them. I wasn't terribly interested in the first third, but the chapters were so simple and short it was hard to not feel like I was making progress (it's one of my little OCD reading quirks: I have to feel like I'm making progress when I read, so I'll look at how many pages I've been through, or how thick those pages are). The second third and into the final quarter (is this measurement making any sense?) was quite good and I found myself genuinely interested in what was going on with the characters. I busted up a few times when Bethany was describing the pigeons in London: "If London is a meal, then pigeons are the parsley on top of it, except instead of being green and crisp, they're grey and hobbling and missing toes, and while they may appear to be technically cute, they also appear to be riddled with disease and mites." The end left me feeling sort of sad again. I'm undecided about it as a whole.

The Lovely Bones was basically what I had heard: really good and about a really terrible topic. I loved the perspective of Susie watching everything from her heaven. I think I finished in about three days (again, my OCD about seeing how much progress I made). I'm really interested to see the movie, though I think that it will be hard to watch too. This is a definite recommended read...but I must say that I awsn't really a big fan of the end with a weird out of body experience, and a less than satisfying ending for the antagonist. I'll leave it at that though.