Book Review time!

I finished a book! Two books! I'm feeling pretty good about that, so here's my personal, non-binding opinion of two Booker Prize nominees.

"Mothers Milk" Edward St. Aubyn. The names don't get Britisher than St. Aubyn (pron. "Sin Awbin"), and this book is pretty darn British, too. So although it contains a slimy psychiatrist elite academic sees-himself-as-a-third-person emotionally distanced father, it has its upside. Namely, the precocious older son of his who narrates the first quarter of the book. The beginning is a grim but hilarious piece of reminisence on birth, and it would be really too much to ask the rest of the book to be as good. And it can't be, but it's really darn good, even though it's a bit misogynistic with bad mother characters. This book still rocks, though.

"The Secret River." Kate Grenville. In the secret garden, the little lonely girl found a run down former monument to beauty and, uh, stuff (it's been a while). In the secret river, a transported Englishman finds a pack of aboriginals he can't understand, a bunch of jerks who are exploiting each other and has a wife who can't stop talking about going back to England, where their life was painted as even bleaker than in Australia. The book would have been better if people hadn't been quoted like this but rather in the usual way. I'm not sure what contemporary writers think they're doing with their free use of italics and punctuation.

I'm starting "Carry Me Down" (author? can't remember) and it's so far about a boy who knows when people are lying. Well, if "Blink" wasn't enough, here's the fictional version. And that's good enough for me. Because Malcom Gladwell may be full of himself (and he is!) but I still like just about everything he writes.

In other news, these guides are pretty good when it comes to helping me know something about going to the Cancun area: Moon handbooks, Rough Guide and Hidden Yucatan.

In incredibly shallow news: did anyone else notice how the Others have a really stringent planning code for their creepy suburb? There must be all sorts of homeowner association covenants governing the color and size of homes they can build. And boy are they hateful to outsiders. It's like Maumelle, Arkansas all over again. Because I definitely got the feeling some of the people in Maumelle would have loved to put a bunch of people that they considered outsiders into former dolphin holding tanks.