The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

I am not an ardent enthusiast of science fiction, but I can usually appreciate the older stuff. Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Ray Bradbury can all be fun little excursions. The Martian Chronicles are an excellent example of such. Bradbury has an incredible imagination. His work is not merely answering, "What if there were little green men?" Rather, he is much more conceptual. He has things to say about human nature, and "life, the universe, and everything."

The Chronicles feature various Earthlings' experiences with the Red Planet. Some stories are connected, some are years apart from each other. Each is profound in its own way. Particularly memorable was a passage detailing the perfection of the Martian religion. Bradbury explains they found the perfect blend of nature and the supernatural, something lacking in the Earth religions. Incidentally, I was just reading an essay of C.S. Lewis' asserting that Christianity does just that.

I was also captivated with the image of a character named Spender. An astronaut on one of the first expeditions to Mars, he is filled with reverence for the planet upon landing and disgusted by the irreverent revelries of his fellow travelers. He runs away and spends time studying the ruins of the Martian culture. He is struck by the profundity of their philosophy. He hatches a plan to create an intellectual utopia on Mars, eliminating any who would spoil his vision, but he himself is killed before he can execute his scheme.

The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett

Good old Dashiell Hammett- beautifully laconic, concise, and predictably unpredictable. There is something to be said for short, well-written books.

The Thin Man is just a detective-mystery deal, but it was quite enjoyable. The characters were fun, the protagonist witty and crazy. The husband-wife relationship was fascinating. She would go out with other men, he would be found physically comforting other women, and yet there was no question of their fidelity and trust in one another.

Hammett's people are so real. It is almost as if he created them and then just let them run around, doing what they do, weaving this intricate story. I love that he was actually a detective himself. It is a genuine case of writing what one knows.

Tom Jones by Henry Fielding

I am so glad I finished Tom Jones. The novel was Vanity Fair-long. It was basically the story of an illegitimately-born Tom Jones, a chronicle of all the adventures and hardships he encounters before he discovers he is actually the son of a rich man and therefore heir to a considerable fortune. Quite convenient.

Of course, there are romantic elements, but they are surprisingly explicit for 18th-century England. Jones sleeps with three different women, but, tellingly, never the heroine. At least, not until they get married at the end. Though the narrative was still relatively prudish, the soap opera-like plot conventions were different from the other early British literature I've read.

Fielding was a funny guy in his own way. He actually made me laugh out loud a few times. For instance: "At length we are once more come to our hero; and, to say truth, we have been obliged to part with him so long, that, considering the condition in which we left him, I apprehend many of our readers have concluded we intended to abandon him for ever; he being at present in that situation in which prudent people usually desist from inquiring any further after their friends, lest they should be shocked by hearing such friends had hanged themselves." (Book XII, chapter III)

Or this one: "Had we been of the tragic complexion, the reader must now allow we were very nearly arrived at this period, since it would be difficult for the devil, or any of his representatives on earth, to have contrived much greater torments for poor Jones...What then remains to complete the tragedy but a murder or two and a few moral sentences!" (Book XVII, chapter I)

This book, I suppose, fully deserves the category of satire ascribed to it. Still, it was very long. It lagged especially in the middle, though it did pick up in the end. It was altogether all right, but very, very long.

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

I came across The Eyre Affair online, where it was touted as a potential crossover for Jane Eyre fans. Imagine my excitement, my delight, my impatience to read this book. Then imagine my utter despondency, my disillusion, my disenchantment, when I read it and found it to be a poorly contrived fantasy with minmal Eyre-time, if you will.

The book is supposed to to be set in 1985, but it is a parallel-universe 1985 with over-the-counter cloned dodos, regular rents in the fabric of time and space on the side of the road, and a constantly shifting sense of reality with the line between fact and fiction quite blurry. Literature has an abnormal presence in this world, and some guy, apparently half-demon, has discovered a way to place fictional characters in the real world and kill them. Our main character must find a way to stop him before he murders the entire canon of classics. Blah, blah, blah.

The characters were flat, the dialogue was static and forced. The plot was choppy, the details were poorly thought out. For instance, the premise is that in this world's version of Jane Eyre, Jane never goes back to Rochester in the end. Later on, Fforde's protagonist causes the real ending to come about. I do not think Jane Eyre would have become a beloved classic without its original ending. The book is nothing without that ending. And it is a bit narcissistic to make one's character the cause of the best part of one of the best books ever.

Oh, and the typos. One "bails out;" one does not "bale out." Very, very bad. Throughout the entire book, I felt as if I could do a better job. It was an amusing concept, but the writing was so bad. I was hoping for a masterful writer who could take me back to the way I felt when I first read Charlotte Bronte's classic. But all I got was a second-rate, sub-par, disappointment.