The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. I seem to be the only person on the planet who didn’t really care for this book. I didn’t hate it; I think Haddon’s technique here works pretty flawlessly, and the book was very funny at times. But it felt a little manipulative to me; I wasn’t especially affected by the sad parts of the narrative because I felt a little pushed around, the way you do when you watch an obvious tear-jerker and you just aren’t in the mood to have your tears jerked.

I don’t understand why this was marketed as adult fiction at all, since it is so clearly intended for young adults. At that level it might work very well — I am not really interested in young-adult fiction so I can’t judge it. I thought it was a little too obvious to really work from an adult perspective, though. I confess that I am not a huge fan of the narrative technique of having a narrator who is too young or too messed up to accurately judge the world around him. I mean, it works when the narrator is Benjy or Scout, but usually the technique annoys me. And even in the case of To Kill a Mockingbird, I suspect I would love that book less if I had read it for the first time as an adult.

Last Orders. Another class assignment that I am “reading” via audiobook. I will go back and skim the print version later, but I have to do a class presentation on this one in a few weeks so I am trying to get a little head start. I really like the novel so far but I kind of hate the narration: different readers for each “voice,” with exaggerated accents and vocalizations. Just read the damn book and let me figure it out.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman. I am only about seventy-five pages in but I really love this so far. Some of his sentences seem to get away from themselves, but this is a lot of fun to read and so far, much better than the movie.

The Remains of the Day. I respect but did not love this book. I admire Ishiguro’s subtlety and I think his prose is just great, but found it very difficult to get through this book for a couple of reasons. First, the humor is a type that I find intensely embarrassing; I don’t like snickering at a hapless narrator. Second, I can only stand so much butler-speak at one go; the language was too off-putting to hold my interest for more than a few minutes at a time. Finally, we come down to the great Moby Dick issue: at some point you just can’t stand one more second of all that whaling … or in this case, all that butlering.

Once I managed to read more than six pages in a row, I liked the book okay, but it will never be a favorite and I was relieved to finally finish it.

The Ghost Road. I liked this better than The Eye in the Door but not quite as much as Regeneration. I think the trilogy works better as a whole, though, than as individual novels; the only one that really stands alone is Regeneration, and even that one is more compelling as part of the trilogy.

I enjoyed the trilogy a great deal but I am glad that I read it for class, because I think that on my own I would have given up after the first book — not because Barker’s writing is bad or unsatisfying, but because her subject matter is so grim and depressing. World War I: not a barrel of laughs.

If I have a criticism of the trilogy and this book in particular, it is that it occasionally veers into a sort of preachy obviousness. Not often, though — mostly Barker is pretty brilliant in the way she weaves contemporary sensibilities into her historical fiction. Once in a while, though, I felt like the author was back there saying, “See? See how I brilliantly weave contemporary sensibilities into my historical fiction?” I still highly recommend the trilogy if you have the stomach for World War I.

The Eye in the Door. I finished this last week and as with Regeneration, I found it very affecting. But I didn’t think it was quite as good a novel; I thought her prose was a little clunky in some places and she occasionally went for the cheap emotion or explanation when I wanted something more complicated.