Chalk & Cheese reading

I've really caught the reading bug lately. Sometimes the exoerience can be rewarding; at other times, frustrating. This recent pair are a case in point.

Getting the dross out of the way first, J.J. Carrell's The Shakespeare Secret is a sad attempt at hanging the clothes of (controversial) literary research on the skeleton of a ridiculously convoluted, utterly inept thriller plot. The cynical effort to come up with soemthing in the mold of Dan Brown's wretched The Da Vinci Code falls flat on its sad and sorry face. The writing is abysmal, the extensive interruptions which deal with the question of whether or not Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare are confusing and tedious, and the plot itself is inane. To be avoided at all costs by anyone fortunate enough not to have come aross it yet. Stay clear!!

Larry McMurtry's Some Can Whistle, on the other hand, is alive from start to finish. Basically a story of a father trying to get to grips with the the teenage daughter he hasn't seen since she was born, it's peopled by McMurtry's usual cast of stick-in-the-memory characters (not all of them likeable). But it's the writing which is the real star of the show, especially when read immediately after J.J. Carrell's ineffectual drivel. The father in Some Can Whistle is Danny Deck, who also features in McMurtry's Terms of Endearment. Recommended.