Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips

This is my book club's August selection, and we will be discussing it tomorrow morning at 9:30 am.  I just finished it, and wanted to jot down my thoughts before the meeting. (It should be noted that the Vaughan Public Library carries this novel as one of their Book Club selections, and as a result, we were all able to borrow this title from our local branch!)

I heard through the grapevine that many of the ladies haven't finished Gods. Some really didn't enjoy the mythological characters and references, and so they gave up early after about 40 pages.

Knowing that, I pressed on a little further, and to my surprise, I actually found this novel quite refreshing and very entertaining.

Here's summary: Twelve gods of Olympus find themselves living in the twenty-first century, but they are crammed together in an old London house--and none too happy about it. Times are tough for Gods, as no one really believes in them anymore, so they've had to get day jobs: Artemis as a dog-walker, Apollo as a TV psychic, Aphrodite as a phone sex operator, Dionysus as a DJ. 
 
Soon, what begins as a minor squabble between Aphrodite and Apollo escalates into an epic battle of wills. Two perplexed humans, Alice and Neil, who are caught in the crossfire, must fear not only for their own lives, but for the survival of humankind. Nothing less than a true act of heroism is needed-but can these two decidedly ordinary people replicate the feats of the mythical heroes and save the world

This was a very creative novel. It was fiction, but I want to label more as creative "mythological" fiction. It reminded me alot of Tom Robbins' work...Extremely imaginative, and very unique. There is fiction, and then there is a leap of faith. Phillips takes the reader to the next level of creativity. Here's a link to her blog...She's a character! http://www.mariephillips.co.uk/

One reservation that I had with Phillips writing is that it sometimes relied too heavily on conversation, and I almost felt that I was reading a script at times. Not surprisingly, it has been picked up by Hollywood as a screenplay. 

King's 11/22/63: A Great Trip Back in Time

OMG, it's been too long. I have been reading but I lost my thought process. I didn't blog the last book that I read because I didn't finish it (that being Fifty Shades of Grey...ugh...Maybe I'll finish it, but I won't promise that!).

So here we go...Stephen King's 11/22/63 is a whopping 1900 pages.  It took me nearly a month of steady bedtime reading to polish this one off, but I found myself wanting to turn in early, just to catch up with the story. This is a very entertaining read, and I found myself thinking about the book during the day.

Here's a synopsis:  Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching adults in the GED program. He receives an essay from one of the students—a gruesome, harrowing first person story about the night 50 years ago when Harry Dunning’s father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a hammer. Harry escaped with a smashed leg, as evidenced by his crooked walk.

Not much later, Jake’s friend Al, who runs the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to 1958. He enlists Jake on an insane—and insanely possible—mission to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake’s new life as George Amberson and his new world of Elvis and JFK, of big American cars and sock hops, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake’s life—a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time.

This is my first King novel andI have to admit that I was pleasantly surprised. I wasn't expecting such cleaver writing, but I can't fault it at all. In fact, I look forward to reading more of his creative work.