Fran: L is NOT for Lee, L is for Lelord

I tried.  I read almost 30 pages of Ashton Lee's The Reading Circle.  In Ashton's defense, maybe the first book was better.  Maybe I needed to care about these characters before I began this one.  In my defense, perhaps the publisher/cover designer should have more prominently displayed the fact that it was a second book in a series.  Probably a flaw that this I found the second book's openings so bland that I could not be bothered to finish it or seek out the first book.

Instead, at the same time, perhaps in uncanny premonition of its dullitude, I picked up Francois Lelond's Hector and the Search for Happiness.  I vaguely remembered it had been made into a movie with Simon Pegg (whose films have amused me).  If I had remembered that while at the library, if I had had access to the web and its reviews, I might have also passed on the book.

Hector is a psychiatrist from a nameless city somewhere in the Western world who decides to travel the world and look for the secret of what makes people happy.  The book is a series of small vignettes told in broad generalizations; the idea is that this is a children's style book for adults.  The characters are flat and generic--deliberately so, to make us feel that they are universal.  The situations reveal Hector as privileged, white, wealthy enough, shallowly male.  Women are primarily paid attention to for their beauty; Hector is constantly remarking on it and how he's had more than his share of attractive women.  His guilt over being complicit in the Asian sex trade is patronizing and shallow--I must actually love her to have slept with her; I will wind up my world tour by using my business connections to take her from this life of selling her body for money.  His Western admiration for the mystic wisdom of an ancient Chinese monk continues to stick in my craw as I relive the book in this review.  The list of "revelations" are fine for what they are but seem quite like thinly veiled psychological claptrap.

My search for happiness reached fulfillment with the eventual end of this book.  I do not need to read the sequel of Hector and the Search for Love.

(I may continue to read "L" authors in the search for something good.)