Week 39

Well, zero dollars this week.

I did think of a quote.

"Use the thesaurus only to remind yourself of words you already know."

I finished Curtis Smith's Sound + Noise. The book had a really good premise and some promising characters. Tom is stuck in limbo. His wife, the victim of a car accident, is both alive and dead. Brain-damaged and lifeless, she whithers slowly in a long-term care home. Jackie, a one-time back up singer for a successful road band, has been back in her hometown for years -- choosing to buy her uncle's bar when she could see that her band life was drying up. Each are weighted down by their pasts. Each wants or needs something more.

They find each other, but the courtship is slow.

I really liked Jackie as a character, and some of Smith's description are dead-on.

However, the novel is weighted down by too much philosophizing. There's a long discussion on faith between Tom and his best friend, and in this scene, the characters become mouth pieces for the author. Their dialogue is stiff and sounds as though they're reading from a Faith 101 book.

Another drawback is the interior lives of the characters. They turn everything they observe into a symbol. They think too much and too lucidly. It's like they're both grad students in literature, trying to turn every observation into a symbol.

It makes the book hard to read. It's hard to explain, but it felt over-written.

Still, there were enough moments that I liked that if I were on amazon right now, I'd give the book 3 stars.

Without Wax and The Tea House remain my favorite novels out from Casperian Books.