Juliet, Naked

I finished Nick Hornby's Juliet, Naked this week. I listened to it myself and have to say that for a simple book I liked it a lot. The audio was read by three different people who read the perspectives of the three primary characters. They each get to read in the style of how they hear the other characters when those characters speak in their section. this was the part of the book that really dragged me in. I began to wonder what I sound like to other people and how they make me sound when I'm not around. The book is concerned with Duncan and Annie who have been married for many years. Annie works in a small sea-side museum and is very dissatisfied with her life and Duncan teaches at the local college. More importantly both to Duncan and the story he writes online about film, television, music and most importantly Tucker Crow a singer songwriter who dropped out of the music scene (Think Thomas Pynchon or J. D. Salinger). Tucker Crow, in spite of being outside their lives is right in the middle of Annie and Duncan's marriage. As Chekhov tells us a gun introduced in the first act has to go off before the third and sure enough it does. A "new" Tucker Crow album has come out and Duncan and Annie wind up on opposite sides of it. Where Tucker was sort of in the middle he now becomes more so first in album and then giving nothing much away in person.

In some ways Hornby gets a lot of the obsessive fan and chat room member right, at the same time he makes Duncan a little too simple a character. He makes us realize why Annie is dissatisfied with him but doesn't make us realize what she ever saw in him. He tries to wave that away by making Annie wonder the same thing but doesn't present anything that feels like it was there ever.

Tucker is the bigger of the characters and sort of takes the book over and that is somewhat of a problem. I imagine that somewhere there are musicians who put down their instruments and turn their backs on the muse but they don't seem very real. Tucker unlike J. D. Salinger isn't holed up in his room writing novels for himself, he is just watching television and that doesn't seem right.

Barring those quibbles I liked the book very much and will probably listen again with H on the trip to Canada this week.

Some new daily fun

I got a new program that lets me track the dog walks we take every day, so I am going to try to put them up here. I will try to add some other stuff along the way but the walk should get me here.

We got Hastings originally because we thought that having a dog would get us out and walking. And for me at least it did. My beloved wife H doesn't like to walk as much as I do so the job fell to me for the most part.

Since we moved to the apartment, we have been taking the dogs to the park every day. I do a couple days by myself and a couple of days with H. The doogs and I still like it but H isn't so in love with it. You will see the difference when I start putting up the maps.