4.18.2000

    Stayed home sick yesterday and did some moping around. I also finished one of the best books I've read in a long time, High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby. It was so good that I'm tempted to go out and read everything he wrote. I really, really enjoyed it. It did surprise me that Nick Hornby was not Bret Easton Ellis. Which for my intents and purposes, was a good thing.

    I didn't buy it so much for the fact that there's a movie out. Though the movie has sparked a number of people I know to remark, "that was one great book." But, well, this is sort of embarrassing though I don't know why. See, I wanted to buy something to read, something escapist and fun but I didn't know what. I looked through my Wish List at Amazon but all of that seemed too serious. So, I gave Pamie's book page a whirl. Somewhere in the last third of the page is her review for High Fidelity and I thought, "yes, that's exactly what I want."

    My reaction differs from hers in that I haven't started making "Top Five" lists but then, it's not really a surprise that Pamie would make lists, is it? No, I didn't think so. And, I guess I made peace with most of the rotten things boys did to me in my life since I mostly found myself increasingly bemused by the main character, Rob, continually spinning his wheels.

    Naturally, I will be seeing the movie. I'll see anything with John Cusack in it. And, with one sweeping nod to Pamie, Rob & Kymm while completely making myself a hypocrite — here's my top five John Cusack movies of all time:

1. Grosse Point Blank - John and Joan, you can't go wrong.
2. Being John Malkovich - phenomenal.
3. Better Off Dead - how could kymm not love this?
4. Say Anything - this is only on the list because I love everything about Cusack in this movie but that barely makes up for the fact that Ione Skye makes my teeth itch something fierce. She did not deserve Lloyd Dobler.
5. High Fidelity - yeah, I know I haven't seen it but I have high hopes and the character in the book is John Cusack.

    To get slightly back on track, I think Nick Hornby is brilliant. And, I want to read all of his novels but you know how you really love a book and then get disappointed by the rest? Or, you buy a CD because you love this song you heard on the radio and the rest of the songs are just really, really terrible. Ih. I don't want that. So, if you're a fan, or if you hate his work, drop me a line.

    Another book I finished reading about a week ago is Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, recommended by Scott Dexter. He send me an email, "here's a book you should read," and I went out and did. It's by Tom Robbins who I'm not, unfortunately, overly-familiar with. He's a Northwest author and every now and then I hear his name dropped so I was wondering who this cat was. This cat, it turns out, is a weirdo.

    The book was decent enough. Strange enough. A lot of people hated it over in the Amazon comments (Powell's needs to do that before Amazon patents it). An equal number of people loved it. So, I gave it a shot and came up lukewarm. There were parts of it when I just rolled with the story and couldn't put it down. There were other parts when I tipped the book on its edge to see how many pages I had left. The end left me... bored.

    I don't know how I wanted it to end. I suspect with Robbins' writing that there's no way you could guess at an ending or rewrite the ending because... you'd be writing forever. And, that's how the end was for me. It was like an editor said, "Holy Christ, Tom, when is this thing going to end? How about right now!" or "I wonder if Tom will notice if I just rip up the last two chapters of his book?"

    On the whole though, I didn't hate it and I'm intrigued enough to check out one of his more popular books, such as Even Cowgirls Get the Blues or something called Still-Life with Woodpecker which a guy at a bar volunteered I might enjoy, seeing as how I had Half Asleep goin' on.