Nom de Plume

I tried to read this while Dave was here working on the kitchen. He’s a great guy, but I was feeling very scattered. Not only was I reduced to wandering Seattle like a homeless person, but I was without office, without any place uncluttered to sit (in truth, the house looked like a bomb had hit), and without any peace amid the hammering and drywall dust. All this is to say that I got midway through the book, put it down, and never picked it up again. In short, dear reader, this was an abandoned book. And I am perfectly willing to admit that there were external circumstances that contributed to its abandonment.

However.

The mess in the house matched the mess between the covers.

I am ambivalent about Special Topics in Calamity Physics. Marisha Pessl does a fabulous job of capturing a certain mood and feel. She has a keen eye, and is truly witty. At the same time, I found the novel incredibly disorganized. The story moves along in fits and starts–and when the plot is moving forward, it’s a great read. But there are pages and pages devoted to nothing more than setting the mood with arcane references and intellectual acrobatics. To this end, every paragraph has several long parenthetical asides; my feeling is that if one relies so heavily on parentheses that a quarter of the book is devoted to them, one should consider better organization. Ultimately, Special Topics lost me.

It’s too bad. There was so much good stuff there–but it could have used some ruthless chopping.