Friday, April 08, 2005
Weather
Denver is having its Springtime Winter Weather Issues. It is April and snow is predicted. Completely normal for us. We had 75+ temps yesterday, and today it is starting to turn. We should have snow by Sunday. This kind of weather makes me restless and lethargic at the same time. Not sure how that is possible. It just makes me want to sit for the whole weekend and read. Forget the social engagements I have agreed to, forget the pit of unorganized stuff my house has slowly degraded into. Pick up on of the many books sitting around that have been started and left lying around with sad dusty bookmarks. I started I Capture the Castle and I think I left it at a friend’s house. Not smart since I kinda got interested in it.
I finished Devil in the White City a few days ago and I have to say that it is a strange book. I think the language the author uses is a bit overblown. I think he spent too much time reading Victorian newspapers or something when researching this book. It is the strangest combination of World Fair planning and Serial Killer.
Planning the World's Fair is forgettable because I did not care about the characters, although I was interested in the engineering. He did not give the characters enough humanity to make me really care what happened. My curiosity was peaked about the politics and the crazy negotiations it took to get the Fair off the ground, but I just did not give a rat’s ass about the main characters. Then next to that is the great detail about the serial killer and his world. The killer - a Mr. H. H. Holmes - has been haunting me. He is just a creepy creepy psychopath who preyed (mostly) on single women. Blech. It just makes you think of all the charming and soulless people who walk this earth harming others without a second thought. I keep thinking about a book review I read on Salon (I can’t seem to find the review or the name of the book right now) where the author claims that 4% of the population are psychopaths. Since then I have seen that most researchers in the field think she is basing that purely on conjecture.
Apparently I am rambling tonight.
I finished Devil in the White City a few days ago and I have to say that it is a strange book. I think the language the author uses is a bit overblown. I think he spent too much time reading Victorian newspapers or something when researching this book. It is the strangest combination of World Fair planning and Serial Killer.
Planning the World's Fair is forgettable because I did not care about the characters, although I was interested in the engineering. He did not give the characters enough humanity to make me really care what happened. My curiosity was peaked about the politics and the crazy negotiations it took to get the Fair off the ground, but I just did not give a rat’s ass about the main characters. Then next to that is the great detail about the serial killer and his world. The killer - a Mr. H. H. Holmes - has been haunting me. He is just a creepy creepy psychopath who preyed (mostly) on single women. Blech. It just makes you think of all the charming and soulless people who walk this earth harming others without a second thought. I keep thinking about a book review I read on Salon (I can’t seem to find the review or the name of the book right now) where the author claims that 4% of the population are psychopaths. Since then I have seen that most researchers in the field think she is basing that purely on conjecture.
Apparently I am rambling tonight.
# posted by lyskie @ 6:58 PM 
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He probably could have written two very good, but seperate books: one about the World's Fair and one about a Chicago serial killer. He mashed the two stories together, which really had no link to each other save that they happened in the same city at the same time.
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