Book Review: Carry Me Down

In J.D. Salinger's classic novel The Catcher in the Rye, my main man Holden Caulfield talks about how, with some books, you wish you were friends with the author so that you could call them up and talk to them about their book. M.J. Hyland's Carry Me Down is a book like that. In fact, I plan to dig up an email address for her so that I can ask her some questions.

Bottom line is that I really liked it. I just recently read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon AND The Pleasure of My Company by Steve Martin, both of which share Carry Me Down's first person narrative by a character of questionable mental stability, so I feel sort of like I should read something different just to have a change of pace.

I'm glad I read it, though. John Egan is our 11-year old narrator, an almost six-foot-tall giant of a pre-adolescent who believes he has the ability to detect lies. You end up in John's head, which is not always the case with first person narratives. There are things I want to know, however. The story makes reference to a past traumatic event in John's life, and we never get any resolution on that. Truthfully I can't even guess as to what it could be. I guess that's my only big question for the author and I guess I could try to figure it out if I read it again, but truthfully while it was a GOOD book, it wasn't especially fun to read. It was kind of tough, since poor John had such a hard time and you're right there with him through it all. I loved him a lot, and my heart bled for this giant-sized child who wanted so much for the world to be fair.

I'm excited to go watch Spaced with my friend Johanna. I didn't realize Simon Pegg was in it, and I kinda love him. I went over to Johanna's to watch Birds of Prey and give her a non-comic person's perspective on it. You can read all about it here, and you should spend some time browsing around Johanna's world because she is very insightful and pretty brilliant. So anyway, I have three final exams to complete, and then I have that British sitcom goodness to look forward to. I hope to do all three exams Tuesday after work. Wish me luck.

The boys are here. They're playing beer pong in the basement. I expect after hanging out with just me and Katie all evening Dwight probably needed a strong dose of testosterone. And beer. And pong.