Light reading catch-up

I haven't read much recently, but should be coming into a nice stretch of reading and blogging a bit more prolifically.

I happened to be passing my local public library just after Xmas and saw it was open, popped in to see what I could glean from the shelves - mostly a load of RUBBISH, it turned out.

I enjoyed James Lee Burke's The Tin Roof Blowdown (incredibly depressing to think about Katrina and its aftermath), Mercedes Lackey's Foundation (generic and not particularly well-written, but I like this kind of book - I think Lackey is somewhat inferior to Anne McCaffrey and Marion Zimmer Bradley, but I usually find her books worth reading in any case as they are so much the sort of thing I enjoy), Jennifer Weiner's Best Friends Forever (highly readable, but not so much my kind of thing - alas, the jokey mystery is not a favorite of mine - I am not a Susan Isaacs fan, either).

The other books in the pile were so drivelly that I could not finish any of 'em, it made me wonder how people can stand to either read or write such simple-minded things (I just about skimmed my way to the end of this, but I had to put this aside without finishing it - surely the early books in the series were far better?!? - and I found this nigh unreadable.)

On the plane down to Cayman, I read another of Morag Joss's books, Funeral Music; well-written, but somewhat preposterous in the plotting and I am also not crazy about the mildly satirical orientation towards the characters.

I also started rereading (and finished over the next day or so) Mary Renault's pair of novels about Alexander the Great. I really love Renault's novels, I grew up reading them (along with Robert Graves of course) - I picked these two up from my mother's house over Xmas after my friend and former student Julia Hoban mentioned one of them and reminded me how much I liked them when I was younger.

Fire from Heaven seems to me much less good than I remembered - it is written in the third person, unusually for Renault, and it is a voice that works much less well for her than the first. Rosemary Sutcliffe did this sort of thing much better in half-a-dozen of her books. But The Persian Boy is wonderful!

I read an amazingly good novel the other day, I would give it a very strong recommendation indeed and was surprised I had not heard more about it when it came out (but perhaps I just wasn't paying attention, 2009 was a year of having my mind on other things than literary fiction!). It is Michelle Huneven's Blame, and I truly loved it - beautifully written, both the characters and the setting are really wonderfully well-rendered and the book itself (it is the vein of Kate Christensen and Sigrid Nunez) is actually quite spectacularly good in an understated way.

Another good one (on a totally different note - I was combing the piles of unread books in my apartment the night before I left for Cayman and trying to find appealing things to take with me to read!): Me Cheeta: My Life in Hollywood. A one-joke book, but it is a very good joke, and beautifully well-executed. Also, one of the best cover designs I've seen in ages!