Fates and Furies - Book 15 of 2018

I read Fates and Furies to spite the reviewers who juts didn't like the characters (that is just the laziest reaction to a book that I can imagine), but it was a surprisingly pleasurable reading experience. The core of this book provides its relevance. The story is nothing inspired and the characters are a bit a flat and cliche. The dynamics of the marriage makes the book worth reading. The whole playwright thing is a joke. A famous playwright? Really? Are there really that many theaters clamoring for stuff from the newest hot thing? Maybe, I have absolutely no interest in the stage so maybe the hot young thing really is famous in the right circles. Our protagonist's name and backstory are utterly ridiculous. The same goes for his wife. But the marriage made the book readable. It's hard to capture exactly what made that part of the book work, but the way two lives were joined and became something greater than two individual lives captures something very real. The rest of the plot is just embellishment. They were better together then either of them could have been alone. That idea, and the reasonably good writing, propelled this book to critical acclaim. Marriages matter. This book puts that feeling into words.

I did not buy this book. It came to my attention through the Kindle Daily Deal. In years past I would have bought it on intrigue alone, but I'm no longer so quick to surrender to intrigue. I read it as an ebook from the library. It's not part of any list and it gets me no closer to Book Shelf Zero, but the book snagged me from the first few pages. It was fairly short and pleasurable to read. I'm happy to have read it. I'm glad I didn't buy it.

Fates and Furies is book 600 in my Goodreads list. I was hoping that book 600 would be some long held book that I've taken forever to getting around to reading (like The Confessions of Nat Turner, which I have finished but haven't gotten around to blogging about yet), but it was this random book that I just happened upon. I added yet another book from my past to extend that list another digit past 600 earlier today. I had not yet noted that I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X in my distant reading past. I'm pretty sure it was late in high school. It may have been early in college. I don't remember all that much of it, but I read it during an impressionable part of my youth so I'm sure it tweaked me a bit in some impossible to rediscover way.

I have been extending my list through audiobooks, The Godfather and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and other library books that are also on one of my lists (Old Man's War, I'll get around to commenting on this one eventually, after Nat Turner of course). I thought I was done with library books for awhile, but a title that I put on reserve was automatically borrowed today. My plan was to read one of my owned ebooks. I even read a few pages of one of them yesterday. I may set that aside to read this new book. Maybe I'll try reading them both while also reading Flashman and the Mountain of Light, an effort that was strongly inhibited by Old Man's War. I like seeing my to be read pile shrink (especially as I have decided to not buy another book until I get at least one more book read), but the quick and entertaining library reads are so appealing.