Two Durrells

I stopped reading Lawrence Durrell's book The Greek Islands after it irritated me for fairly trivial reasons -- he called an island dear to me "a bit of a slut." So, I had felt slightly guilty for failing to sample his purported literary masterwork, the Alexandria Quartet.

Not any more!

http://www.themillions.com/2009/04/modern-library-revue-70-alexandria.html

Much as I suspected.

While elder brother Larry was launching his literary career, little brother Gerry, unwittingly anticipating the unschooling movement by several decades, was running barefoot on Corfu, working on his nature collection and, evidently, his comic prose style. (As often happens, it's the youngest sibling who gets the sense of humor.) My Family and Other Animals, Gerald Durrell's memoir of his childhood years on Corfu, is a perfectly delicious book. I'm crossing my fingers that the two sequels are half as good.

Peter and the Starcatchers

Peter and the Starcatchers, by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson, is such an awful book that I'm not going to wait until I finish to review it.

This book is an effective, non-habit-forming substitute for a sleeping pill. Allegedly a prequel to the J.M. Barrie classic, it is sheer torture to read aloud, draining the life force out of the reader with every artless, plodding, cliche-ridden sentence. The characters are wooden, the attempts at humor are vulgar and/or disgusting (but what did I expect from Dave Barry?), and the story line is predictable and tedious.

I would drop it immediately if I weren't reading it aloud to a six-year-old who wants to find out how it ends. Learn from my experience -- don't start.