(no subject)

I finished Werewolves in Their Youth a day or two ago, and my assessment remains pretty much the same: good, solid stories, but certainly not as good as Chabon's best work. I was unimpressed by the sameness of the collection. There were too many stories about depressed ex-husbands trying to figure out why their marriages had collapsed, or bored young couples trying to figure out why they had married each other in the first place. Not surprisingly, the stories that I liked best were the two that differed from that formula. "Spikes" does feature a depressed ex-husband but it's also about baseball, and if there's one thing Chabon can do, it's write about baseball. The last story in the book, "In the Black Mill" is by far the biggest departure. It's ostensibly authored by August van Zorn, who is apparently a very minor character who makes an appearance in Wonder Boys. Wonder Boys is the only Chabon novel I haven't read, so that didn't mean a whole lot to me other than the fact that, by writing in the voice of van Zorn, Chabon very consciously abandons his own usual style. The story is an old-fashioned sort of tale of suspense and horror, and Chabon demonstrates a surprising knack for that kind of writing. The story is just fun in a way that the rest of the stories in the book weren't.

And now I am reading Life of Pi by Yann Martel. Ms. E and others have told me that I ought to read it and I tend to like Booker winners, so my hopes are high. I have hardly read enough of it to comment, but it's been quite engaging so far...

In other news, Ms. E and I are housesitting this weekend, which means we're going to get paid a hundred dollars to spend the weekend living in a mansion with two chocolate labs. I can think of worse ways to make money. So here's a survey: what should we do with the hundred bucks?