Longleg - Glenda Adams

This was a curious little book. Ms Adams is a lecturer (so the bio claims) at one of the universities here in Sydney - UTS, I think. That tidbit has no real relevance to the book... so I figured I'd share it anyway.

Set in not too long ago Sydney, little laddie's growing up. His family's a little strange, consequently he's a little strange... and he finally finds himself when he's about 40 or so.

The story took a bit to get into - it started off sounding a bit like one of those sort of dusty, raspy historic novels, where the past seems to be so heavily troweled onto the pages that the flow of the story gets buried. A little perserverance is warranted, as the main character slowly attracts interest, and things start to make sense.

In fact, the story seems to gather just a little too much momentum, and starts to skip over things toward the end, so that it was a little less satisfying that I'd hoped.

Not a bad book all round, and rather fun to read about the places that I pass through from time to time.

Hold the Enlightenment - Tim Cahill

Apparently, Tim Cahill is a travel writer with a sense of humour, and he also teaches people to write. Apparently.

This is one of those cases where someone's written the blurb on the back of the book, and the jerks are lying. It's not uproariously funny. It is trying to be funny - trying quite hard, in fact.

Consequently, it's rather sophomoric - remember that kid in school was was all profound and funny and stuff at the same time? It was Tim, and he's not grown up.

About the only good thing about the collection of short stories that constitutes the book is that he seems to know he's an entirely average writer who gets to go to some interesting places.

Catcher in the Rye - J D Salinger

Finally got around to reading an old classic. And it was pretty good.

What else is there to say about something that's been studied by everyone from high school students to PhD hopefuls?

Interpreter of maladies - Jhumpa Lahiri

This is a great little collection of stories - I'm writing this far too long after finishing the book to really remember them in detail. There's one about a poor woman who lives as the caretaker sort of person for a small apartment building in India; there's a couple getting through the first bit of an arranged marriage - I think that's the one where he moves to America to work at a university...

I do recall that all the stories were notably empathetic - not in the sense that one comes away from reading them feeling "oh, those poor people" or "how darling the way they love each other". In little vignette style glimpses of peoples' lives, the verisimilitude in the special ordinariness of everyone's stories made the people exceptionally real.

It's not - and doesn't claim to be - an exhaustive or authoritative treatise on the lives of Indians around the world. It is a collection of well written, engaging short stories.