The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
I'm not sure I really expected much from
The Alchemist; it was loaned to me by a friend who seems to think my reading taste is rather dark (he's probably right), but it was easy reading so I finished, fully convinced the book went where the author's thumb on the scale dictated.
I may have indicated my dissatisfaction with
The Belgariad elsewhere, so in short: a story drawn out a book or two longer than it could sustain displaying thread-bare imagination some of it drawn from old movies, vapid prose, standard issue characters, and a travelog of locations likely to be torn down and reassembled later for some other fantasy brick.
I hadn't read anything from Heinlein later than
Starship Troopers, so I decided to jump back into his writing when
Friday was trumpeted as a return to form. Really?! How bad had his previous form become? I never bothered to find out since his characterization of Friday was suspect, and the book as a whole shallow. I'm not fond of
Starship Troopers, but it was better than
Friday by a long stretch.
Three novellas have put me off their writers when I thought they'd be good entry points into their works:
The Breast by Philip Roth took a potentially fascinating and amusing variation on Kafka's
Metamorphosis and made it dull and boring.
Seize the Day by Saul Bellow was a slog and William Styron's
The Long March was that, exactly that. It's possible I'd like other works by these writers, but I've found a lot of the writers who came to prominence post-WWII do nothing for me, compared to those post-WWI. That said ...
To Have and to Have Not by Ernest Hemingway was, up to a point, an okay attempt to tap into the kind of pulp adventure story that he'd inspired other writers to write with his pared down, precise, poetic prose. Until late in the book. Apparently embarrassed with himself, he tried to leverage the book toward a literary profundity that hadn't been earned up to that point. The 1944 movie directed by Howard Hawks and starring Bogart & Bacall is a lot more fun as it rehashes
Casablanca.
