#27308 - 02/06/07 11:41 PM
Special Topics in Calamity Physics
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graceless
Ching Shih
Registered: 12/23/01
Posts: 574
Loc: Illinois
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Would anyone be agreeable to discussing the book with me? I don't want to spoil it with those who haven't read it yet.
_________________________
"Sometimes I doubt your committment to Sparkle Motion!" - Donnie Darko
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#27309 - 02/07/07 12:21 AM
Re: Special Topics in Calamity Physics
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Frannie Glass
Ching Shih
Registered: 04/06/04
Posts: 266
Loc: San Diego
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I would love to- although I know it's a book club selection for later this year, I don't know if there's a guideline about that.
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#27310 - 02/07/07 09:42 AM
Re: Special Topics in Calamity Physics
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LaSalleUGirl
Ching Shih
Registered: 06/25/01
Posts: 1565
Loc: Philadelphia, PA, USA
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It's fine by me -- we won't be talking about it until November, and I don't want you to have to wait until then to share your thoughts. When November rolls around, I'll just include a link to this thread along with my other notes on the book.
Please preface your posts with spoiler text, though. Here's some sample spoiler text to get you started:
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#27311 - 02/07/07 06:32 PM
Re: Special Topics in Calamity Physics
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Kivrin
Ching Shih
Registered: 06/01/00
Posts: 4287
Loc: Santa Cruz, CA, USA
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I don't mind either, but I won't have anything to add to the discussion, because I'm waiting until November to read it. I will have to moderate the thread though.
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#27312 - 02/08/07 09:49 AM
Re: Special Topics in Calamity Physics
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Masha
Ching Shih
Registered: 05/23/01
Posts: 512
Loc: Chicago, IL, USA
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I can keep an eye on it, Kivrin, as I've already read it, if you'd like to keep yourself unspoiled (and you totally do!).
As soon as I finished the book, I went back and read the first chapter, thinking that would help. If it hadn't been due back at the library, I think I would have read it straight through again. And yet, I can't decide if I liked it. Hm.
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#27313 - 02/08/07 10:21 AM
Re: Special Topics in Calamity Physics
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AlchemyGirl
Ching Shih
Registered: 04/10/05
Posts: 175
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Glad to see this thread open!! It's the kind of book that begs to be discussed, and I'm dying to hear what other people thought.
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Here's my two cents: like Masha, I can't quite decide if I liked it.
While I appreciated the ambition and the quirkiness of the book, I'm unsure whether I felt the plot entirely worked. I thought the solution to Hannah's death was a bit of a deus ex machina. It just didn't quite fit with the book I'd been reading; having Blue turn into Nancy Drew '06 and looking people up on the internet to discover that Hannah was a 60s radical seemed out of rhythm with what had come before. Yes, this explanation did explain a lot about Blue's upbringing and Gareth's wanderlust, but it explained almost nothing about Hannah herself (at least in my eyes).
Of course, if Peshl wants us to question whether Blue's lost her mind, that was exactly the way to do it. But if Blue's just nuts, why did her dad run off? Oh, my head ...
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#27314 - 02/08/07 01:24 PM
Re: Special Topics in Calamity Physics
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Frannie Glass
Ching Shih
Registered: 04/06/04
Posts: 266
Loc: San Diego
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spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space
I really enjoyed it, although I do agree that the end seemed out of sync with the rest. I didn't really mind that though.
The most fun for me was determining the significance of the chapter titles and trying to sort out if they were foreshadowing and/or giving extra clues. For example, am I the only one who suspected (at least for a little while) that Gareth had something hands on to do with Blue's mother's death- because of the chapter title Othello?
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#27315 - 02/08/07 04:44 PM
Re: Special Topics in Calamity Physics
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Kivrin
Ching Shih
Registered: 06/01/00
Posts: 4287
Loc: Santa Cruz, CA, USA
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I can keep an eye on it, Kivrin, as I've already read it, if you'd like to keep yourself unspoiled (and you totally do!).
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#27316 - 02/09/07 02:47 PM
Re: Special Topics in Calamity Physics
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graceless
Ching Shih
Registered: 12/23/01
Posts: 574
Loc: Illinois
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spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space
I just wonder how OK Blue seemed to be when her father abandoning her and all.
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_________________________
"Sometimes I doubt your committment to Sparkle Motion!" - Donnie Darko
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#27317 - 02/13/07 01:16 AM
Re: Special Topics in Calamity Physics
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anchorsandkeys
Ching Shih
Registered: 06/24/03
Posts: 68
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spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space
I came into the book with high hopes, and I was disappointed. I thought the story was interesting, and Pessl certainly has talent (the last paragraph, with the umbrella, was beautiful) . . . but I just could not get past the character of Blue. To start with, I thought she was extremely annoying -- which made the book hard to get through in the same way that Catcher in the Rye is hard to get through for me. Granted, a protagonist does not have to be likeable, but if you have an unlikeable protagonist, you need to have something else going on in the story that's interesting enough to motivate your reader to finish reading. In this case, that was the mystery -- but neither Hannah nor the mystery were really engaging enough to keep me truly into the story. If I hadn't just spent twenty bucks on the book, I would have been hard-pressed to push myself through it.
Also, I may be picky about this particular point because I spent all fall taking a course on detective fiction, and read Special Topics right after -- but Pessl broke one of the top rules of writing a successful mystery novel, and that is this: If you want your readers to believe that your "detective" has an off-the-charts, genius-level IQ . . . you need to find some way to construct the story so that your reader does not figure out the mystery before your protagonist does. (This is why so many mystery novels with supposedly genius detectives are told through the eyes of a sidekick who is of average intelligence -- Holmes & Watson, many of Christie's mysteries, all of the Poe short stories, etc.) I'm not going to say that I had the mystery unraveled by halfway through the novel, because that would be an exaggeration -- but I was always well ahead of Blue, which makes it hard for me to buy her intelligence.
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