Marley and Me, John Grogan

Lorena Pugh, Yellow Yearning

(May 28) I came to this really late -- I had heard so much about it that it became one of those books you feel like you've already read before you even open it, and from the reports everywhere I was a little afraid of its being soppy and sentimental, a kind of Chicken Soup for the Dog Lover's Soul.

But my mom had a copy and wanted to pass it on. She said, "Oh, read it, it's cute."

Well, it is cute, and I was pleasantly surprised that it was not too soppy and sentimental. In fact, I'm scratching my head about the reports of how people cried over it and also about how quickly it was made into a big Hollywood movie.

For I didn't feel that I got to know Marley as an individual at all -- he was just a collection of stories about things he destroyed, and they were pretty standard stories, I thought. My dog-nephew Buster was a way more creative thief and destructive force in his lifetime. So, I'm guessing that's what made the book so popular -- people thought of their own dogs, whom they did know and love, and they cried about losing them.

I was also a little creeped out by how often Marley was walloped and allowed to choke himself on a choke chain, and by how matter-of-factly Grogan described coming home time and again to find Marley bleeding from the mouth and paws from having tried to rip an escape hatch through a wall or a metal crate in a panic. I admit I've never owned a 100-pound dog, but... geez.

The Comfort of Saturdays, Alexander McCall Smith

Samuel John Peploe, Betty

(May 16) More of the wonderful same. It's amazing how addictive this series is, given that nothing really happens in the books.

In this installment, I was surprised that we entered into Jamie's consciousness a few times (we haven't before), and surprised that (1) Jamie is still thinking longingly of Cat and (2) Isabel is still attached to John Liamoor (if only unconsciously).

The Reader, Bernhard Schlink (translated by Carol Brown Janeway)

B.S. Wise, Oedipus and Jocasta

(May 10) It's challenging to review this book since I had such a bizarre experience with it.

There was a lot of hoopla surrounding the movie last year but I kind of avoided interest in the story because it sounded pretty dark. Then the movie won a few Academy Awards this spring and people on BookCel who hadn't read it back when it was a bestseller had taken up the book. Their very positive reviews, and those of people who'd read it years ago, persuaded me to gamely sign on as the eighty-third waiter-in-line at the library.

But when I finally got the book, I realized I had read it before. I just couldn't remember how each act in the play ended -- until I got there and went "oh yeah." I kept thinking that I must have put the book down unfinished at some point when I "first read" it. But I kept recognizing every scene and conversation, every philosophical passage, as I came to them, right till the end.

So that was either the longest sustained episode of déjà vu ever or I read the book many years ago and wasn't impressed enough to remember I'd read it when the movie came out. Is that a kind of review in itself? On the other hand, I was impressed with it this time through. It's really a very thoughtful allegory about guilt, and the love story is weirdly compelling.

I can only imagine that the first time I read it I must have thought it was about first-generation German guilt and must have thought it was being very second- or third-removed about it all. And I bet I didn't appreciate the abstract philosophizing and probably just rushed through those bits. Maybe I thought The Reader couldn't hold a candle to the most traumatizing book about the Holocaust I ever read -- Anya, by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer.

But this time through I realized it was about second-generation guilt -- a whole different kind of psychological morass, and an absorbing one. I also appreciated the author's musings on his experience much more keenly than I must have originally. How awfully afloat one must feel to be the offspring of the most vilified generation in history. But then if that generation was collectively a Hanna, is it fair to vilify?

This whole interaction was further complicated by the fact that The Reader is a book about reading, and I'm a reader who normally doesn't like to re-read books. Also, it is a translation, which I always think of as the reading equivalent of washing your hands while wearing gloves. Strange bedfellows, The Reader and I.