Christmas shopping?

Yeah, I coulda said "holiday shopping," but you understand, right?  If you don't understand, then go out and buy The Sparrow (Mary Doria Russell), the most politically correct book of all time.  (I know, you already read it.  Probably in a place of honor on your bookshelf.)  It's earned my VIDS (Verily, It Doth Suck) rating, and not only for its unrelenting (sometimes unimaginable) political correctness  It also qualifies by virtue of an extraordinarily high degree of preposterosity.  Even for sci-fi.  Not to mention poorly drawn characters and an ending which the author subsequently undid so she'd have a plot for her next book.  It's not the worst book of all time;  I'll discuss a couple of candidates - the finalists, actually - in a future post. 

Now, if you enjoy good lit, here are two books I finished recently.  First, Anne Michaels's The Winter Vault.  I enjoyed it more than her previous novel, Fugitive Pieces, written about 10 years earlier, even though the earlier work received greater acclaim.  Michaels is a poet, and I dig writing in which special care is taken with language.  Many of her passages seem less written than chiseled.  FP, though worthwhile, was a bit too cryptic for my taste.  WV is close to great, and it shoud be exceptionally appeciated by book groups.  Check the back and forth in the reviews on Amazon.  Insight and articulate argument abound.  (Not a bad idea to read them before you read the book itself.)  Same goes for The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon.  Except he's not a poet.  But he did get a MacArthur "genius grant."  And LP does reach my "great" threshold.  One book I didn't finish was Steve Toth's A Fraction of the Whole.  It takes a lot for me not to finish a book, but this one was long enough to confront me with the realization that I might end up hating myself for sticking with it beyond the 250 pages I'd already read/spent.  And who knows how much it would cost to replace whatever I broke when, upon closing the back cover, I hurled it against the nearest fragile object.   I have no idea how it got on the Booker Prize short list.  I do know that the jacket blurb comparing it to A Confederacy of Dunces ought to give John Kennedy Toole's estate grounds for libel.

Thinking more about the Bush tax cuts and what's gonna happen.  Well, not so much what's gonna happen, but what's happening right now.  One thing that's happening is that liberals like Lawrence O'Donnell (MSNBC) are trying to convince other liberals that this is the best deal we can get.  Note that I didn't put "liberal" in quotes when I used it to describe him.  LO'D's a genuine lib.  He's arguing strenuously and cogently for doing this deal.  I'd like to hear him tell us if he'd still support it if its passage guaranteed that the tax cuts for the upper 2% AND that the estate tax reduction (REDUCTION!) from the Bush years would both be made permanent.  Because that's a virtual certainty if this deal gets done.  May not happen in 2012; Congress may kick it further down the road yet again.  But it'll happen sometime, and when it does, undoing it will be off the table for a generation.  That's close enough to permanent for me.