Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Re-Integration + BCOO - You Suck, Christopher Moore

I know you've all been on pins and needles about my wordpress experiment. For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about (read: all of you), I decided to move my Book Club for One over to a separate blog on wordpress.com for a bunch of un-interesting reasons.

Well, I hated the site. I also missed the occasional comment from *intelligent* readers. Especially when I got this:

"how could you whomever you are actually enjoy this book? Its bland, hard to read, and the book is screaming out to be put down every time you read a line. Add to that flicking to the back of the book to check meanings of words etc, it is on the whole a very unsatisfactory book"

That was in response to my post about Hard Times, by Charles Dickens, and it made my decision for me: BCOO is moving back to The Peeled Apple. Go ahead and groan, I can't hear it.

I know it may be boring for some, but I like to have a record of what I've read and how I felt about it.

Here's what I thought of You Suck, by Christopher Moore:

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The last couple Moore novels I’ve read have left me wondering whether my reading taste has changed. As I read A Dirty Job and some of Moore’s older ones recently, I started to feel like Moore had lost respect for his readers. I started out feeling the same way about You Suck, Moore’s latest. It’s a sequel to one of my favorite Moore novels, Bloodsucking Fiends.

As always, it was wonderful to encounter some of the characters I remember from his other novels. There are the usual winks to well-versed Moore readers, which can get tedious at times.

But then the story kicked in. Moore gently makes fun of his characters, while unfolding a one-of-a kind story about true love between vampires. The novel takes place in San Francisco, which is conducive to Moore’s self-indulgence as well as his humor. It’s a give and take, but in this novel the humor wins. With a self-conscious goth girl named Abby Normal narrating a large portion of the novel, and the return of The Emperor of San Francisco, You Suck completely hits the mark.


This is Moore’s tenth novel and though they aren’t all winners, he is definitely an original. His novels are guaranteed to be unique, for better or worse. I definitely recommend Moore for anyone who likes to read screwball novels tightened with sincerity. But I’d start with Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal


Next up: The March, by E.L. Doctorow

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