Sunday Salon: Mr. Fooster and the assassin

It's been a slow week for me. Strangely, I just wasn't in the mood for reading. I wound up abandoning last week's read, because it was becoming a bit technical in the middle and I was losing interest, and I've been trying to allow myself to not finish books if I don't want to finish them. But it's still hard.

A couple days ago I picked up something I thought would jump start the reading program, Ridley Pearson's Killer Weekend. It's not an edge-of-your-seat thriller, but it's okay. A small-town (but Quantico-trained) Sheriff is trying to keep an assassin from killing the New York State Attorney General, who's about to declare herself a presidential candidate. The assassin turns out to be the most interesting character.... Scratch that. He's not exactly an interesting character. We don't understand his motivation. We know he wants to kill the AG, but we don't know why. What's interesting about him is he's one of these very adept assassin types, so he does cool things--like he adopts multiple personalities. The Sheriff is pretty adept at what he does, too, though the things he does aren't nearly as cool. So, the book is flawed but readable. I managed about an hour of reading today.

Ah. I did also receive earlier in the week a review copy of a book entitled Mr. Fooster Traveling on a Whim, by Tom Corwin. It's a very short book, and so I read it right off--takes about 20 minutes. I've been wondering if it merits a review at book-blog.com. So far at least I haven't bothered. Here's what I jotted down in my notebook:

Tom Corwin's Mr. Fooster Traveling on a Whim is the quickest of reads, a hundred odd pages, half of them full-page illustrations, the other half light on text. It's a sort of fable. The eponymous Mr. Fooster goes for a series of walks in what feels like a dream. Strange things happen to him that don't quite make sense, in the way of dreams. He befriends a giant bug, for example, and blows a big bubble that turns into a drivable car. Along the way he ponders questions like Why is yawning contagious? and How come you never see baby pigeons? The moral of the story is banal: basically, one shouldn't lose one's open-mindedness or sense of wonder lest one become rigid and miss out on life's bounty. Unless I'm missing something. Perhaps I'm just too old and embittered to appreciate the book. Probably in final form (I read an advance copy) it will be a pretty book: you can see the quality of the illustrations and hear selections of the text at the book's accompanying web site. But while the short text is trying to be meaningful, to me it seems not deep, but merely precious.

Maybe I will post it at the book-blog. Later in the week.

Tags: The Sunday Salon