Takk's Log

Takk

Finished my first book of 2010.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower

I picked this up after noticing it on a couple of Best Books of 2009 lists. It's a collection of nine short stories (about 20-30 pages each). Cracking writing, brilliant characters and interesting stories. Great stuff. I can't think of a reason to really dock it a mark: 5/5

Blurb:

"Viking marauders descend on a much-plundered island, hoping some mayhem will shake off the winter blahs. A man is booted out of his home after his wife discovers that the print of a bare foot on the inside of his windshield doesn't match her own. Teenage cousins, drugged by summer, meet with a reckoning in the woods. A boy runs off to the carnival after his stepfather bites him in a brawl.

In the stories of Wells Tower, families fall apart and messily try to reassemble themselves. His version of America is touched with the seamy splendor of the dropout, the misfit: failed inventors, boozy dreamers, hapless fathers, wayward sons. Combining electric prose with savage wit, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is a major debut, announcing a voice we have not heard before."

Takk

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I hate when I read a critically acclaimed book that I end-up disliking but this didn't appeal to me much: 2/5