It’s Friday; I’m in Love

It’s a little rainy, like May should be. May showers bring June flowers, right?

On our camping trip, we had to make emergency trips to Pemberton to buy more supplies (bigger tarp, new stove, more beer, again with the more beer) and on one such trip we noticed that the Pemberton Public Library was having a book sale!

I picked up a copy of Timothy Findley’s first novel, The Last of the Crazy People and spent a day reading it. It’s only 281 pages long. It was absolutely superb. Subtle and powerful and engaging. I also grabbed A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe but I haven’t really started it yet.

I picked up a book I’d never heard of, The Weight of Winter by Cathie Pelletier, without really reading the back cover. It had that trade-paperback look to it so I thought it was safe (mostly the books at the sale were Clive Barker and John Grisham. And there were three copies of A Man in Full) The other day I took The Weight of Winter for bus reading but I could only mush through about 5 pages; it was so cutesily written. Plus, the author used quotation marks to denote both dialogue and thought. I hate that. If I think somebody is talking, I don’t want to have to figure out that now they’re thinking. Pet peeve.
So then, in mid-gag on the bus, I took the time to actually read the back:

The wacky back country universe of Mattagash, Maine – a logging town of some four hundred souls just north of nowhere – sprang to delightful life in Cathie Pelletier’s first two novels. Now, THE WEIGHT OF WINTER guarantees Mattagash a permanent place in the literary landscape somewhere between Spoon River and Lake Wobegon – with all the heartfelt life of Fannie Flagg’s FRIED GREEN TOMATOES AT THE WHISTLE STOP CAFE.

Yeah.

Strike one: it’s the 3rd novel in a series.
Strike two: literary landscape.
Strike three: wacky back country universe.

I’ve never read the Fried Green Tomatoes book. I bet it is really good. The Lake Wobegon books are good, I know this. But TWoW set out to invade the “literary landscape” inhabited by these good books and comes off – in the first 5 pages, anyway – as a bumbling weirdo. Not in an interesting way, just in a sort of “oh you smell a little. Don’t sit next to me” way. It’s a fine line.

Now I have to go to work. Happy Fridee.