Wilson's Weblog

by Sanjay Gupta, Audiobook read by Christian Rummel, 2013, Hachette Audio

Dr. Gupta is apparently a fairly renowned medical spokesperson, but his attempt at a novel is pretty miserable.  It is a series of subplots with no overarching plot.  The characters are somewhat interesting but not to the point of really capturing this reader’s attention.  The author, in fact, attempts in several situations to bolster interest in a particular character through the use of flashbacks to their childhoods.  In one such situation he goes into an incident at a carnival in the childhood of one of the brain surgeons to illustrate the profound emotional stress that she is currently going through.  Really?

This book would probably be able to feed numerous TV episodes of ER but as a novel it sucks. 

by Dan Brown, audible edition read by Paul Michael, 2009, Random House Audio, New York

This novel is a sad effort in comparison to The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons.  Rather than providing the reader with cliff-hanging suspense and fast action, The Lost Symbol devolves into a treatise on the symbolism of the ancients and noetic science.  Mr. Brown somehow feels that the ancients understood the innermost workings of the mind but this knowledge was somehow lost.  Modern science is only now rediscovering it.

Brown seems to pick the worst times to launch into his boring lectures on the knowledge of the ancients.  His hero, Robert Langdon, also seems a pale shade of the character he once was in the previous two books.

If this book had attempted to focus only on the theories of the ancients, it would have been a bad book.  Trying to combine this stuff with a suspense thriller made it a really terrible book.  In fact, the best line in the novel occurred about three quarters of the way through:  The villian said to Langdon as he was torturing him, “It’s almost over, Dr. Langdon.”  I wish it had been true because I felt as if I were being tortured as I went through the rest of this garbage to get to the end.

by Jeffrey Eugenides, 2011, Farrer, Straus, and Giroux, New York

After reading Middlesex and giving it a “5-Star” rating, I was really disappointed in this book.  Eugenides brings the same great writing style to this book, but the subject matter is much less compelling.  It’s about three Brown students, two males and a female, who struggle to find themselves and their relationships, both prior to graduation and after.

There are a couple of problems with the book.  The first is that none of the three individuals were particularly interesting to me.  One of the males is enmeshed in his own depression, the other in religious studies.  The female, on the other hand, seems terribly wrapped up in herself and her love for the depressed male.  What happens to these three in the book seems overly drawn out.  The plot thickens, but to the point where the reader seems stuck in molasses!

One other thing I didn’t like about the book was, in spite of being a Brown graduate myself, the references to the Brown campus and surroundings in the first part of the book seemed way overdone.  I could relate to having coffee in the Blue Room at Faunce House and all the other spots on campus (need I mention the Ratty?), but I felt it was at the expense of being a decent book.  Anyone who had never set foot on the Brown campus would probably not care about all these place names.

In addition to all the Brown references, the first part of the book is loaded with other arcane references to literarary and cultural individuals that I had never heard of (nor have much interest in ever learning about).  I often got the feeling that Eugenides was name dropping and just showing off.  Come on Jeff, enough is enough!

Well, what is good about this book?  Eugenides writes incredibly well.  His sentences and paragraphs just fly along and each one invites the reader to read on to the next one.  The old saying goes that easy reading is the result of very hard writing.  I, as the reader, can almost feel the effort put forth by this writer as I fly through his prose.

Unfortunately, when I finished Middlesex, I felt that I should have read it more slowly to savor it; in the case of The Marriage Plot, I felt that I should have read it even faster to be done with it!