… about spending 24 hours on The Fall of the Towers: it meant I stopped trying to read The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which simply isn’t a good book, 150 pages in. If you’re not going to write in a high literary style, then you better be an awfully good storyteller. Carter Beats the Devil works just great in that field, and Gould’s Book of Fish sorta manages to string those two modes together (to name two recent books I’ve read). But Chabon’s book is just dully written, with a story that’s failed to capture my interest twice now. And given that it’s about escape artistry, eastern European Jewish history, and comics, it shouldn’t be THAT tough to come up with something I’d like to read.
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