What I'm reading

So... the last two books I read completely sucked: Chain Gang All-Stars, which I DNF'ed, and Eleanor Oliphant is Perfectly Fine, which I hate read, but finished. I cannot, for the life of me, understand why everyone thinks Eleanor is so great. Not only did I hate the character, but Gail Honeyman's prose is so insultingly bad, I don't know how she got published, let alone a bestseller.

I need a palate cleanser.

I picked up Harlan Coben's new book, Nobody's Fool, because I know Coben's prose is sharp and witty (sometimes I actually laugh out loud by one of his many unique turns of phrase), and that it would be a fast, entertaining read. I'm 100 pages in, and already intrigued. There are so many moving parts - he sees a woman he thought he killed from his past, she might be the missing daughter of a prominent, wealthy family, and all of this happens to coincide with the exact moment someone he put in jail when he was a cop is released. He is the connection, the Lynch pin. I cannot wait to see how they all come together.

My only issue - he can't write a woman character. At all. All of the women in his life are these perfect, lovely, loving women, including his present wife, who overlook all of his flaws and he's just so lucky to have them. And they have no flaws. No depth. They are just archetypes of the beautiful, caring woman who loves a man no matter what he looks like or how badly he behaves. Yuck.

Still a good read.