Vacated

I went away on vacation when I should have been posting here.  Darn me!  In two and a half days at the lake, I figured I could polish off at least three books--that's what a lake retreat is for.  I swam the width of the lake three times total, but I only finished two books.  Dear readers, I feel I've let you down.

One of the books I finished was Lamb, which took me an unholy amount of time to get through.  Ha, I didn't even meant that as a pun.  Before I left, my interest in it was flagging--it got a little too...weird.  The beginning, Christ's childhood, was really, really good, and pretty much in line with what I'd anticipated.  But then he and Biff wander off to see the world, and I don't think I'd realized that the point of the book was to explain what happened between his childhood and his ministry--the 17 missing years.  So when that chunk started, my response was, "Where the hell is this going?"  The stories of the things that happen to them didn't fit into the overall arc of the story I was expecting. 

But once I figured out that this is what the book is--it's mostly Christ's Wacky Adventures, I got back into it. I was able to invest properly in the characters they met and the antagonists and see how things fit together thematically.  And at the end, when they get back home and the story begins to cover the ministry, I was almost disappointed--it did that sort of Hitting the High Points thing that PBS productions of Great Novels do--well, yeah, that's what happened, but it's hard to retain the sense of what makes the story great. 

Overall, I'd say I liked Fool better.

And now I'm into The Passage, by Justin Cronin, which I'm assured is going to be a vampire book, but so far is really just some great human drama.  I had to return it to the library, but I'm hoping I can get a speed read copy from Belmont or Cambridge.  I can pound that out in two weeks--I'm dying to read it right now!