Given up on Gold Bug
February 25, 2003 (2:30 PM) ( link )

I've given up on Richard Powers's The Gold Bug Variations: too dense, too elliptical, too stilted for me, thank you very much.

In exchange, I've started reading Native Speaker, Chang-Rae Lee's novel about...well, I'm not sure yet. (I'm only about a dozen pages in.) It's written well, and, more importantly, simply. There hasn't been a real emotional hook yet, though, so we'll see if I actually grow to like the book.

In between giving up on Powers's novel and beginning Lee's novel, I managed to polish off another Connie Willis novella, Uncharted Territory. This is the worst of the three Willis novellas I've read (the other two are Remake and Bellwether). It's just too thin of a novel, padded by Willis's trademark chaos and research, but supported by too little else. Of course, this is Willis we're talking about, so the novella ain't bad. Just don't expect to be blown away.

I also read Frank Miller's Give Me Liberty, which is just stupid. Perhaps I should stop reading Miller's lesser known works and instead turn toward his much more celebrated writing in the Daredevil and Elektra series.