Catching up

Just finished simultaneusly reading The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie and Sharpe's Prey by Bernard Cornwell. As might be expected, these are fairly different reads. I was about 2/3rds of the way through S. V. when Sharpe was loaned to me, and put it on hold until I finished Sharpe (a breezy 3 and 1/2 hours). Of the two, SV was much better written and thought out, but Sharpe was slightly more enjoyable, despite being hackneyed and enormously cliche. The constant changes of tone and style in SV were probably the things that kept my interest the most, as the characters, while good, where too clearly symbolic caricatures of things much bigger than themselves. This made it somewhat difficult to get into the characters. Richard Sharpe, while a fairly banal Napoleanic adventurer, at least has the lightness of not carrying around with himself the role of symbol for The Native, The Religious Believer, The Taker, etc etc etc. In fact, probably the best bits of SV for me were the dreams about various Islamic historical figures, as I recognized just enough to be vaguely familiar yet had now idea how closely they resembled history at all. Probably the same reaction most of America had to the Da Vinci Code, which I have been boycotting, not least because Ron Howard and Tom Hanks are both involved with the movie (double evil *shivers*).

Good grief, this sounds like a freaking eigth grade book report. I find the college sophomore level critique of postmodern literature as opposed to old fashioned cheap story to be clearly implied in the last paragraph and not worth my time or effort expounding on. Just trying to get back in the rhythmn of posting on here.