Book catch-up

Last week I finished a book by a Ukranian author, Andrei Kurkov, called Death and the Penguin. It was a fantastic premise for a book. A struggling writer with a pet penguin who writes obituaries that turn out to be more like death warrants. It was by turns hilarious and tragic, just like a good Slavic novel should be, but it really petered out in the end. I wasn't looking for a cathartic ending, I just want to know what happened to the damn penguin!

Also, like any satirical novel originally written in another language, I wonder how much humor or how many references were lost in the translation. I felt a bit of that "I think I missed something" when I read Bulgakov's Master and Margarita. Don't get me wrong, I loved that book, but I felt like I needed to have lived in Soviet Russia to really have understood it, as if an entire layer of meaning were withheld from me.

For the longest time I put off reading The Time Traveler's Wife, dismissing it as Chick Lit. After a few recommendations from both fellow chick-lit-loathers and border-line-but-intelligent-chick-lit-readers, I finally picked it up this weekend. Well, I was up until 1:00 a.m. Saturday night reading so, if this is chick lit, give me more! Actually, it's not chick lit at all, unless one relegates anything with a love story to the domain of the feminine (i.e. the cinematic theory: no explosions = chick flick). I can't stand those "my butt's big" books or those "all men suck, let's quilt until we find that one gentle man" books, and this is definitely not that. Plus, the author lives in Chicago, and I always love reading about places I know intimately.