I waste my time with this kind of stuff. OK, it wasn't truly atrocious (I'm talking about KJ Erickson's The Dead Survivors) but it's pretty poorly constructed, quite meandering, and vexed with a ridiculously overelaborate plot. Farfetched serial-killer premise. I've got two more of her books on loan, but think I will skip the next one and just go for the most recent, which I was told is quite good. Of course the truth is that I always need some pretty undemanding books to read on the side. I've got Alan Hollinghurst's Booker-winning latest from the library, but don't have the attention to spare for it; a few other volumes of light reading await; but mostly I just need to read for this week's classes.
In the drama course, we're doing Nahum Tate's adaptation of King Lear (many interesting things about this, but it's notorious chiefly for giving the play a happy ending--Cordelia lives to marry Edgar, etc. etc.), plus miscellaneous critics on Shakespeare in the eighteenth century, including Michael Dobson. In the graduate course, we're reading most of Rousseau's Emile, plus various thought-provoking extracts by Eve Sedgwick, Kate Soper and Thomas Laqueur.
I am currently enjoying Columbia's weird election day holiday--in compensation for not getting Columbus Day or any extra time at Thanksgiving, we get Monday and Tuesday off this week--working fiendishly hard to revise my novel. I'm on chapter 7 of 13 which is pretty reasonable. Must finish before Thanksgiving, preferably by Nov. 15 if humanly possible.
Tomorrow I'm going to vote for the first time. Isn't that awful? But I only got my citizenship in 2000, and moved to NY in August 2000 and didn't get it together to register in time for the last presidential election. I have an 8:30am voting date with my friend Nico. I am deeply pessimistic about the likely outcome but will be delighted if my predictions prove wrong.
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I read K.J. Erikson's "Third Person Singular" a couple of months ago and was not that fond of it. I felt that at the end of the novel, the author suddenly decided this was going to be a series and tacked on a hasty job promotion for the main character to allow for that to happen. Also, I hate main characters with "cutesy" names - Mars, Blanche White, Goldy Bear, etc. I don't know anyone by the name of Marshall who would voluntarily choose "Mars" as a nickname! I haven't decided if I'm going to read the other books in the series or not, of which "Dead Survivors" would be next, but it's not at the top of my TBR pile afte reading your thoughts.
ReplyDeleteCongratulations on voting for the first time!