This whole ‘voluntary unemployment before law school’ thing is rocking. I spend my days reading, vegging at the pool, riding my bike, catching up on various bloggage, playing guitar, and generally loafing around the apartment. It’s fantastic. I’ve got a nice little book list off to the right that I want to work through by August 16th, my first day of law school, a day that will likely mark the end of my leisure reading habit for a good long while. And since it’s summer, well, I figured I ought to give Michael Chabon’s Summerland a shot, especially since I liked his last book, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. It’s definitely one of my top 10.

I’m about half-way through and I wanted to see what anyone else out there that might have read it thinks.

So, has anyone else out there in Internet-land read it?

Summerland feels quite different than Kavalier and Clay. It feels, for lack of a better term, like a children’s book. It’s kind of like The Hobbit, Harry Potter, and something else I haven’t read rolled into one. The premise [so far] finds a couple 11-year-old kids trying to save the world but, first, one of the dads, who has been taken hostage by the Bad Guy, needs to be rescued. Yes, it’s a story of Good vs. Evil set in a fairy tale land. With Kavalier and Clay in mind, I didn’t expect this kind of thing from Chabon.

What also hints towards the kids’ book theory is the size of the text and the amount of text on each page. Getting through 10 pages of Kavalier and Clay took much longer than 10 pages of Summerland. It seems well suited to pre-teens. Then again, it’s 500 pages. When I was 12, there was no way you could have gotten me to read a 500-page book.

I don’t imagine the book will change much in the remaining 180 pages, so I’ll just sum up my thoughts now and refer to them when I finish: the suspense of finding out what other kind of shenanigans the kids will have to work through to save Dad and the world is strong enough to make me want to finish it, but, the book is still pretty damn corny.

I should also mention that there is a chance some of the basic elements of the book could be allegorical or metaphorical to something very real and pressing in the world, but who knows. Right now, it’s just corny.