Saturday (Books)

So, I'm reading this book, Saturday by Ian McEwan. He's the guy that wrote Atonement, which received a lot of accolades. He is what you would call a "good writer." His descriptions are not only apt, but well thought out and sometimes completely engaging. His story, however, is not.

The book takes place over one day - Saturday - where a neurosurgeon in England is spending the day doing chores, getting into a little mischief and meeting family for dinner. A nice short story this would make, but not a sizeable novel. It wasn’t until page 206 that I found its inner core, the meat of the book. Most people I know would have given up before that, but because I read books from front to back for each review I do, that rule seems to have shifted into my leisure reading as well.

This makes me consider the space of a book - sometimes a magazine article would do, I think. And since I have just completed my first book and am at work on a second, I have thought about this a lot. I certainly wouldn't have chosen the ideas I did unless I thought they were worthy of a 330 page discussion. And this brings me to Bill Maher's new book, New Rules: Polite Musings from a Timid Observer. Bill Maher is both smart and funny, so he can write a book on anything, as far as I'm concerned. But this new book has a lot of big pictures and is filled with mostly two to five line paragraphs. He says what he needs to in this amount of time, and that is way more difficult than espousing on the trials and tribulations of Kevin Federline's existence in 800 words. Trust me.

So, with length in mind, I have purposely kept these entries short. Blog readers want something light and breezy that you can flit in and out of. You don't want my discourse on the Crimean War or a 3,000 word rant on Patrick Dempsey's comeback (okay, maybe one on "Dr. Dreamy"). You want a pithy couple of paragraphs about the day's events and that still leaves time for you to investigate the penis enlargement patches available and to view that anime that you claim is just about superheroes. Yeah.

Thank God these puppies are short. Because I could easily write 2500 words about Dempsey. And then I'd have to kill myself.