Showing posts with label binge reading. Show all posts
Showing posts with label binge reading. Show all posts
Saturday, February 27, 2016
Title fatigue
A funny old post I found while looking for some quotations for my talk this week: my life in book titles.
Saturday, June 27, 2015
Tuesday, July 15, 2014
Saturday, October 19, 2013
The Proust brouhaha
Aciman on Proust at the WSJ:
Proust is interested in minutiae because life, as he sees it, is seldom ever about things, but about our impression of things, not about facts, but about the interpretation of facts, not about one particular feeling but about a confluence of conflicting feelings. Everything is elusive in Proust, because nothing is ever certain. He isn't interested in characters the way Tolstoy and Dickens are interested in characters; he is interested in the vivisection of identity, in people who turn out to be everything they claim they are not, in relationships that are always inscrutably opaque, in situations that conceal an underside that ends up flattering neither the betrayer nor the betrayed. It is Proust's implacable honesty, his reluctance to cut corners or to articulate what might have been good enough or credible enough in any other writer that make him the introspective genius he is.I am slightly promising myself a month with relatively little else on (next summer, maybe?) in which I read straight through In Search of Lost Time from start to finish - I've read much of it at one time or another, but never in a marathon binge....
Wednesday, September 04, 2013
Postscript
The only trouble with these Jack Reacher books is that they are so short! Done. No new one again for another year....
Sunday, August 26, 2012
Closing tabs
Internet telegraphy! (Courtesy of Alice. It is an old obsession of mine...)
Matthew Kirschenbaum on Tom Clancy's use of tabletop gaming to choreograph battle scenes.
I liked Ready Player One hugely more than I expected to - I caught a glimpse of a few paragraphs over B.'s shoulder when he was reading it, the sequence in which the narrator describes the eighties cultural materials with which the book's characters are obsessed, and thought it really would not be my cup of tea, but in fact it is quite delightful. Then a good recommendation from Becca, Harriet Lane's Alys, Always, and that sent me back to another of Becca's recommendations that I had put on my Kindle but never gotten around to, The Flight of Gemma Harding by Margot Livesey. I love Livesey's writing, and this is an enjoyable read, but I think I just know Jane Eyre too well, and was perplexed by how closely this book followed the earlier novel's contours.
Also: Stanislas Dehaene's Reading in the Brain, which I found worthwhile but not as generally gripping as Maryanne Wolf's book; and a reread of the curious and fascinating Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure, by Victor Nell, which I blogged about here when I first read it. Highly recommended!
Flying back to New York later this afternoon. One more week before the semester starts.
Matthew Kirschenbaum on Tom Clancy's use of tabletop gaming to choreograph battle scenes.
I liked Ready Player One hugely more than I expected to - I caught a glimpse of a few paragraphs over B.'s shoulder when he was reading it, the sequence in which the narrator describes the eighties cultural materials with which the book's characters are obsessed, and thought it really would not be my cup of tea, but in fact it is quite delightful. Then a good recommendation from Becca, Harriet Lane's Alys, Always, and that sent me back to another of Becca's recommendations that I had put on my Kindle but never gotten around to, The Flight of Gemma Harding by Margot Livesey. I love Livesey's writing, and this is an enjoyable read, but I think I just know Jane Eyre too well, and was perplexed by how closely this book followed the earlier novel's contours.
Also: Stanislas Dehaene's Reading in the Brain, which I found worthwhile but not as generally gripping as Maryanne Wolf's book; and a reread of the curious and fascinating Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure, by Victor Nell, which I blogged about here when I first read it. Highly recommended!
Flying back to New York later this afternoon. One more week before the semester starts.
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
The post-Christian Grey world
a day later; it's a great read, highly immersive and extremely well-written. "Lilia Ford" was kind enough to answer some interview questions....
JMD: When I wrote The Explosionist, it was
partly because I’d read Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy and Garth
Nix’s Abhorsen books; I found myself haunting the Bank Street Bookstore and
looking in vain for more books exactly like those, and when I realized there
weren’t any I thought I had better write one myself. What were your
models, in that sense, for The Heartwood Box?
LF: I wrote
the book I wanted to read but couldn’t find.
When you talk about erotica, it’s probably most helpful to distinguish
between brows—high, low, middle. We’ll
forget high-brow—no one is going to read my book and think “it’s just like Anaïs
Nin!” Low-brow is porn or so
incompetently edited that I feel like I’m grading an expos paper when I read
it.
That
leaves the middle, where I’d place my own book.
Critics keep bashing Fifty Shades
of Grey, but E. L. James might as well be the Henry James of this genre. The number one book on the Kindle erotica list
as I write this is Training
Tessa: Hot Texas Bosses BDSM Erotica, about two brothers who try to one up each other spanking and
humiliating their secretary—I highly recommend checking out the cover. The brothers are billionaires, and Tessa
desperately needs money to keep her mother in a special-care facility. Over the course of the story, she starts to
have feelings for one of the brothers, who also falls in love with her. I read it in less than an hour and for the
genre it’s not terrible—the author has a sense of humor, it’s properly edited,
it only costs $.99.
Romance
is different: I think in some ways we’re going through the golden age of the
romance and paranormal romance genres, with some very talented people working
in it. But those writers (or their
publishers) adhere to some pretty hard limits on what they’ll depict. They’ll dip a toe in the BDSM waters—it’s
next to impossible to find a hero who is not
portrayed as an “Alpha”—but it’s no more than a toe. I’m interested in how differences in actual
power, whether social, physical, financial, magical, play out in a relationship. I think those conflicts are very erotically
charged, and that’s what I want to read about (as opposed to things like nipple
clamps). But I also want characters who
are not completely clichéd, a plot largely free of inane rom-com contrivances, clever
dialogue, and a strong sense of the connection between the lovers—why they
truly belong together, why their lives would be empty apart. That’s the book I tried to write.
JMD: The Heartwood Box
is such a striking and appealing title. Did you have the title and/or the
concept early, or did it come late in the game?
LF: They were
both part of the original idea. Every
piece of fiction I’ve written has started the same way: I have a sudden idea
which starts playing out in my head almost like a movie. Either I type as fast as I can or I sketch it
out as an outline, but either way, I have about fifteen pages of material that
forms the core of the story. The seed of
Heartwood was the idea of a young
woman who has desires that she is unaware of and wouldn’t accept if she were;
then the idea of a magical box which could somehow sense and then expose those
desires; and most disturbingly, a male who was very happy to take
advantage.
JMD: You’ve published this book under a
pseudonym. I like the novel very much and wonder how you can resist the
temptation to get more glory from and for it! I know it’s erotica, but do
you see yourself in future integrating your private persona and the Lilia Ford author-persona,
or do you guess you will prefer to keep them separate?
LF: I have two parts to this answer, which I’ll call before and after
Christian Grey.
There is
nothing simple, mentally speaking, about writing under a pseudonym, and I have
no doubt this issue alone will end up making my psychiatrist a lot of money
over the next few years. I initially
chose to use a pseudonym because I have a YA novel that I spent years writing
and I have been trying to get published. I’d just had a set back, so I threw myself
into Heartwood as a kind of
escape. Next thing I knew, I had an
almost finished novel that I could publish myself, in a genre where that is not
a disadvantage. It just made sense to
publish it.
But
erotica is a tricky genre. I read a lot
of it, so the sex in my book doesn’t seem particularly extreme to me, but it
shocked the first people I gave it to who never read that genre. I’m proud of the book: I wrote the best book
I could, but it’s still about a woman with three partners, with spanking and
bondage and a lot of power play that does not necessarily reach a politically
correct settlement. As I got closer to
publishing, I talked to my husband and teenaged son about it. My whole family has been extremely supportive
of my writing, and I felt like I owed it to them to take their views into
account. We all agreed about the benefits
of publishing under a pseudonym.
And all
of this was before Fifty Shades of Grey.
The bottom line is that nothing will
ever be the same with the genre. I’m
still glad I went with the pseudonym, but I quickly became much more lax about
it.
JMD: It’s inevitable, I fear, and probably a question
you will grow very tired of: but what do you think of the Fifty Shades of
Grey books? Many of the usual literary pundits have read very
little erotica and don’t have much context for the whole phenomenon. Do
you have any insights or observations on the basis of having read pretty widely
in the field of contemporary American erotic fiction?
I have no
problem at all talking about Fifty Shades
of Grey—I only wish that someone close to me had read the damn book. I find the punditry a lot more painful and
stupefying than the book itself. From
what I can tell, it is impossible for a critic for The New York Times to write about a book like this without the most
insufferable condescension to the book and the people who liked it. You don’t have to admire or enjoy Fifty Shades of Grey, but talking down
to people who do, privately or openly pitying their lack of taste or education,
bemoaning whatever you think this says about American culture—all of that to me
feels like a failure of imagination on the part of the critic. It would be the same if I tried to write
about NASCAR: I don’t get it, so I probably shouldn’t write about it.
You work
on the 18th century novel, so you are very aware that there is a
long history of cultural leaders attempting to police popular writing through
ideas of taste or morality—and excoriating the (usually female) readers who
consume it. I don’t want to make some
kind of fancy academic point here—or even argue that I think the novel is
“good.” But when 20 million people love a
book, I think critics need to stretch themselves to understand why.
In purely
selfish terms, I think the book is the best thing that could have happened to
writers in this genre. It’s more than
just the attempts to coattail on its success.
The closet door on this kind of reading hasn’t just cracked opened—it’s
been ripped off altogether. E. L. James
finished the job the Kindle started. Arguments that the novel is politically
regressive are beside the point: this is fantasy. People should be able to indulge without
feeling like they’re guilty of unmaking civilization.
JMD: What advice do you have for novelists considering
digital self-publishing? Is there a site or two that you’ve found
especially useful?
I’ll
probably be better able to answer that question when I figure out if I can make
this work: self-publish a novel that finds its readers—those who like this
genre. There is no question the publishing landscape is changing at a dizzying
speed. I wouldn’t put any weight on my
own predictions of where it will be in ten years, except to say that those
people who wax nostalgic about paper books sound a little like my husband when
he talks about his vinyl collection. I’ll
throw out three things that I think are key.
1. Understand the genre you want to publish in. Read a lot in it, buy a lot of books in it,
read the reader reviews, have a sense of the upper and lower ranges of both
success and quality (which in erotica are not necessarily the same). Pay attention to how you make your buying
decisions, why you think a book succeeds or fails, and what the general expectations
of the readers are.
2. The single most important thing will always be
the quality of the book you write. The
great thing about digital self-publishing is that time is not the same issue
that it was. Your book will stay
available—you’re not dependent on Barnes and Noble giving you some of their
precious shelf space. You will have the
chance to find and grow your audience if that audience is out there. But that will only work if you have a good
book to begin with.
3. For God’s sake edit it properly and hire a
proofreader—please.
As far as resources go, I’ll single out Lindsay
Buroker’s blog. She self-published a fantasy series called
the Emperor’s Edge and blogs with remarkable
candor about her experiences: advertizing, sales numbers, proofreading, kindle,
Goodreads—you name it. She’s extremely
generous with her hard-won knowledge, and we can profit from it—and she wrote a
great series also, which gives her opinions a lot more weight for me.
Thursday, May 24, 2012
Wednesday, June 08, 2011
Light-reading catchup
My last really long ride before Ironman Coeur d'Alene went well, with two provisos: (1) I sustained a bizarre sports-drink-related chafing injury that is only just healing; and (2) 48 hours afterwards I was coming down with yet another chest cold! Which I am still battling, so that is frustrating. On Sunday I emailed out my long-overdue essay on Restoration theatre and the novel, and by Sunday evening it was clear that I was coming down with the dreaded lung ailment...
In short, I really have done nothing much the last few days other than ticking off a few minor bits and pieces of business (haircut, doctor's appointments, etc.) and lounging around reading novels. I'm going to a wedding in Baltimore this weekend, and will stop off en route in Philadelphia to see family and leave my little cat at my mother's for the summer; my summer subletters are actually arriving this weekend while I'm away (we'll overlap for about 10 days before I leave for real), so my task for the day is basically to clear all of my stuff out of the bedroom and living room and leave everything all nice for them when they arrive. Many library books must be returned in the interim - I have made a dent, but it is never-ending! I will be holed up in my home office trying to stay out of their way.
(Happily for me, they are bringing a cat with them, so there will be feline company during the transition period...)
Bad for my morale not to be exercising, but the combination of this wretched cold and the still-painful chafing made it pretty clear that I had no choice...
Some very good light reading, by the way. Two real actual non-Kindle books that I ordered as the Real Thing because I wanted to be able to hand them on to my mother: Tayari Jones's The Silver Sparrow, which I found beautifully written and beautifully conceived (several other people I know must read this!); and Terry Castle's The Professor: A Sentimental Education, which I loved. I had read quite a few of the essays at the time of their original publication, but have been meaning for some time to get a copy of this and revisit them all as a whole; the book is full of pretty amazing stuff, not least a few pages near the end of the title essay (and of the volume itself) that give a particularly lovely description of why one might gravitate to studying the eighteenth century.
(One other 'real' non-Kindle book that I devoured about half of last night and am looking forward to finishing later today: Wesley Stace's Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer. It is possible that I am the perfect reader of this book! I love it - it includes all sorts of elements that are exactly my favorite sort of thing, and they come together in an incredibly satisfactory way. When I read a book like this, it makes it hard to go back to the regular crime fodder...)
Miscellaneous other light reading (having a Kindle is an expensive luxury, but a very convenient one - I guess it is traditional in my life to get a cold shortly after the end of the semester and basically do little else for a few days but read crime novels?):
Lawrence Block, When the Sacred Ginmill Closes (possibly even better than I remember from when I read it the first time)
Mira Grant, Deadline (I had preordered this one as soon as I finished the first installment; I think this one really lives up to the expectations created by volume one - strongly recommended if you are at all inclined to YA science fiction/zombie apocalypse, the writing is extremely good and they are pretty much pure reading pleasure!)
Pete Hamill, Tabloid City: A Novel (I found this one quite annoying, and would probably have put it aside if I hadn't been reading it on my Kindle where it somehow seems easier just to finish things off and file them away than leave them half-read; it is under-plotted, and the descriptive language is slightly irritating to me, as it seems steeped in a nostalgia that just doesn't work for me - I would recommend Richard Price or Colin Harrison in this sort of vein, or on a different but related note Pete Dexter, whose novels are all really sort of incomparably better than this one)
Rosamund Lupton, Sister: A Novel (quite good, but not perhaps up to the standard of the lavish advance billing - will certainly read her subsequent books, though)
I am a little worried about how to find enough reading material to load onto my Kindle for the first stage of my summer travels! Might have to get a bunch of free stuff (Hardy, Trollope) that I feel inclined to reread, or perhaps to reread some long series by Susan Howatch or Dorothy Dunnett or George R. R. Martin - or all of the above...
In short, I really have done nothing much the last few days other than ticking off a few minor bits and pieces of business (haircut, doctor's appointments, etc.) and lounging around reading novels. I'm going to a wedding in Baltimore this weekend, and will stop off en route in Philadelphia to see family and leave my little cat at my mother's for the summer; my summer subletters are actually arriving this weekend while I'm away (we'll overlap for about 10 days before I leave for real), so my task for the day is basically to clear all of my stuff out of the bedroom and living room and leave everything all nice for them when they arrive. Many library books must be returned in the interim - I have made a dent, but it is never-ending! I will be holed up in my home office trying to stay out of their way.
(Happily for me, they are bringing a cat with them, so there will be feline company during the transition period...)
Bad for my morale not to be exercising, but the combination of this wretched cold and the still-painful chafing made it pretty clear that I had no choice...
Some very good light reading, by the way. Two real actual non-Kindle books that I ordered as the Real Thing because I wanted to be able to hand them on to my mother: Tayari Jones's The Silver Sparrow, which I found beautifully written and beautifully conceived (several other people I know must read this!); and Terry Castle's The Professor: A Sentimental Education, which I loved. I had read quite a few of the essays at the time of their original publication, but have been meaning for some time to get a copy of this and revisit them all as a whole; the book is full of pretty amazing stuff, not least a few pages near the end of the title essay (and of the volume itself) that give a particularly lovely description of why one might gravitate to studying the eighteenth century.
(One other 'real' non-Kindle book that I devoured about half of last night and am looking forward to finishing later today: Wesley Stace's Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer. It is possible that I am the perfect reader of this book! I love it - it includes all sorts of elements that are exactly my favorite sort of thing, and they come together in an incredibly satisfactory way. When I read a book like this, it makes it hard to go back to the regular crime fodder...)
Miscellaneous other light reading (having a Kindle is an expensive luxury, but a very convenient one - I guess it is traditional in my life to get a cold shortly after the end of the semester and basically do little else for a few days but read crime novels?):
Lawrence Block, When the Sacred Ginmill Closes (possibly even better than I remember from when I read it the first time)
Mira Grant, Deadline (I had preordered this one as soon as I finished the first installment; I think this one really lives up to the expectations created by volume one - strongly recommended if you are at all inclined to YA science fiction/zombie apocalypse, the writing is extremely good and they are pretty much pure reading pleasure!)
Pete Hamill, Tabloid City: A Novel (I found this one quite annoying, and would probably have put it aside if I hadn't been reading it on my Kindle where it somehow seems easier just to finish things off and file them away than leave them half-read; it is under-plotted, and the descriptive language is slightly irritating to me, as it seems steeped in a nostalgia that just doesn't work for me - I would recommend Richard Price or Colin Harrison in this sort of vein, or on a different but related note Pete Dexter, whose novels are all really sort of incomparably better than this one)
Rosamund Lupton, Sister: A Novel (quite good, but not perhaps up to the standard of the lavish advance billing - will certainly read her subsequent books, though)
I am a little worried about how to find enough reading material to load onto my Kindle for the first stage of my summer travels! Might have to get a bunch of free stuff (Hardy, Trollope) that I feel inclined to reread, or perhaps to reread some long series by Susan Howatch or Dorothy Dunnett or George R. R. Martin - or all of the above...
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Fifteen things
At the Millions, some things about my year in reading.
(NB I started writing a list titled "Ten things about my year in reading," only list-making has a natural tendency to escalate!")
(NB I started writing a list titled "Ten things about my year in reading," only list-making has a natural tendency to escalate!")
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Cold comforts
At this point I am straggling under the weight of too many weeks of travel...
On the Megabus to Philadelphia yesterday, it dawned on me that my painful sinuses and sore throat were an AILMENT, not just general malaise - ugh!
Holed up in my office right now, having made a massive raid on the Butler stacks for books about gesture, online gaming, etc. Have a social engagement this evening uptown, realized when I got off the bus this afternoon near Penn Station that it was going to be fatal if I went downtown - how would I ever get myself out of the house again?...
Really the whole week has been a whirl of activity, for better and for worse. Lots of meetings with students, a dissertation defense and various other school stuff.
On Tuesday I went to the lovely Cintra W.'s very fashionable birthday party at La Pasita and hung out with various folks I usually only 'see' online (basically I imagine that I could live about 80% of my life online, with the major exceptions being teaching and training, both of which need to happen live).
On Wednesday the play I was supposed to see with G. was canceled due to an ongoing tenant-landlord dispute; this was a blessing in disguise, as we instead had dinner with my brother M. at Mezzogiorno (I had vitello tonnato and an entree of grilled shrimp, scallops, squid and salmon that was possibly one of the most delicious things I have ever eaten; we shared a tiramisu that was also very good).
On Thursday I saw the absolutely fantastic A House in Bali, which was so lovely that I am only sorry I am blogging about it so late that nobody who reads this will be able to get organized to see the last performance this evening at BAM unless they already have tickets! It was directed by my friend Tanya's husband Jay, and the whole thing is a great production: it's visually gorgeous, the performances are without exception superb, the opera itself is attractively ambiguous (and the libretto is written with a sense of humor, I think, though it is not always possible to tell - in a few early scenes, I was pondering the fact that the idiom of contemporary opera singing is more or less completely incompatible with the display of humorous self-awareness, as it is a manner that verges on the ludicrous until one is quite accustomed to it!), the Balinese musicians and dancers are beyond belief - most fundamentally, though, it's just great music, really beautifully performed and conducted. I was ravished!
Dinner afterwards with G. at a newly opened restaurant just round the corner from 'home,' Burger & Barrel: we shared the shrimp and proscuitto appetizer, then I had the ricotta and meatballs appetizer instead of an entree and a very good brownie sundae for dessert.
(It will sound perverse, but in fact I am fairly desperate to get back to Cayman and stop eating out like this all the time; for this next week or so, though, I will still have to pray - like Augustine - to be granted a regimen of nutritional stringency, but not yet!)
On the topic of profligacy, I have also been devouring books on my Kindle. I still wish Amazon had gone with a PDF-type page-based format instead of the undifferentiated text thing, but it is certainly a convenient thing (a dangerous thing!) for such a voracious reader as myself, and will probably save me much back- and shoulder-ache especially during travels. I read and loved Richard Kadrey's new Sandman Slim novel, Kill the Dead, which is very good in itself but also exactly the sort of book that is suited to this format (nothing complex in the way of layout or notes or anything like that, at least so far as I know!); then Jo Nesbo's The Redbreast, which is a very good instantiation of one of the categories of book I most like in the whole world.
I finished that one just as the bus pulled into Philadelphia; an hour or so later I was sitting with my sister-in-law and niece (13 months!) in a coffee shop, after what had been a slightly harrowingly long (and for me cold-infested) day of travel that culminated in us realizing that we were locked out of the house and would have to wait almost an hour before we could ditch the cumbersome stroller, bags, etc. that we had lugged up and down a gazillion subway staircases in New York and Philadelphia. Cake and coffee did much to remedy the situation, but even better was the fact that I could use the wireless network in the coffee shop to download Nesbo's follow-up Nemesis with just one click.
(I have to figure out whether and how I can get NYPL books for Kindle for free - I am also very impatiently waiting for Google Books to sort out its arrangements with various university libraries so that I can really get anything I want more or less instantaneously and for free and preferably in the original page format - that day has not yet come...)
On the Megabus to Philadelphia yesterday, it dawned on me that my painful sinuses and sore throat were an AILMENT, not just general malaise - ugh!
Holed up in my office right now, having made a massive raid on the Butler stacks for books about gesture, online gaming, etc. Have a social engagement this evening uptown, realized when I got off the bus this afternoon near Penn Station that it was going to be fatal if I went downtown - how would I ever get myself out of the house again?...
Really the whole week has been a whirl of activity, for better and for worse. Lots of meetings with students, a dissertation defense and various other school stuff.
On Tuesday I went to the lovely Cintra W.'s very fashionable birthday party at La Pasita and hung out with various folks I usually only 'see' online (basically I imagine that I could live about 80% of my life online, with the major exceptions being teaching and training, both of which need to happen live).
On Wednesday the play I was supposed to see with G. was canceled due to an ongoing tenant-landlord dispute; this was a blessing in disguise, as we instead had dinner with my brother M. at Mezzogiorno (I had vitello tonnato and an entree of grilled shrimp, scallops, squid and salmon that was possibly one of the most delicious things I have ever eaten; we shared a tiramisu that was also very good).
On Thursday I saw the absolutely fantastic A House in Bali, which was so lovely that I am only sorry I am blogging about it so late that nobody who reads this will be able to get organized to see the last performance this evening at BAM unless they already have tickets! It was directed by my friend Tanya's husband Jay, and the whole thing is a great production: it's visually gorgeous, the performances are without exception superb, the opera itself is attractively ambiguous (and the libretto is written with a sense of humor, I think, though it is not always possible to tell - in a few early scenes, I was pondering the fact that the idiom of contemporary opera singing is more or less completely incompatible with the display of humorous self-awareness, as it is a manner that verges on the ludicrous until one is quite accustomed to it!), the Balinese musicians and dancers are beyond belief - most fundamentally, though, it's just great music, really beautifully performed and conducted. I was ravished!
Dinner afterwards with G. at a newly opened restaurant just round the corner from 'home,' Burger & Barrel: we shared the shrimp and proscuitto appetizer, then I had the ricotta and meatballs appetizer instead of an entree and a very good brownie sundae for dessert.
(It will sound perverse, but in fact I am fairly desperate to get back to Cayman and stop eating out like this all the time; for this next week or so, though, I will still have to pray - like Augustine - to be granted a regimen of nutritional stringency, but not yet!)
On the topic of profligacy, I have also been devouring books on my Kindle. I still wish Amazon had gone with a PDF-type page-based format instead of the undifferentiated text thing, but it is certainly a convenient thing (a dangerous thing!) for such a voracious reader as myself, and will probably save me much back- and shoulder-ache especially during travels. I read and loved Richard Kadrey's new Sandman Slim novel, Kill the Dead, which is very good in itself but also exactly the sort of book that is suited to this format (nothing complex in the way of layout or notes or anything like that, at least so far as I know!); then Jo Nesbo's The Redbreast, which is a very good instantiation of one of the categories of book I most like in the whole world.
I finished that one just as the bus pulled into Philadelphia; an hour or so later I was sitting with my sister-in-law and niece (13 months!) in a coffee shop, after what had been a slightly harrowingly long (and for me cold-infested) day of travel that culminated in us realizing that we were locked out of the house and would have to wait almost an hour before we could ditch the cumbersome stroller, bags, etc. that we had lugged up and down a gazillion subway staircases in New York and Philadelphia. Cake and coffee did much to remedy the situation, but even better was the fact that I could use the wireless network in the coffee shop to download Nesbo's follow-up Nemesis with just one click.
(I have to figure out whether and how I can get NYPL books for Kindle for free - I am also very impatiently waiting for Google Books to sort out its arrangements with various university libraries so that I can really get anything I want more or less instantaneously and for free and preferably in the original page format - that day has not yet come...)
Wednesday, April 07, 2010
Light reading miscellany
I have got behind on my day-to-day book posting! Not much to say, I guess...
Saw three plays.
The one I liked most was Bellona, Destroyer of Cities, an adaptation of Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren (still definitely a work in progress, and distinctly unsettling as a result of its subject matter, but some lovely moments - it is a strange and unsettling vision of the past and the future).
I didn't enjoy Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson as much as Ben Brantley did, though the acting was very good (Colleen Werthmann is hilarious!) and there are at least four or five extremely clever songs.
A Behanding in Spokane was a great disappointment. Some very funny bits of dialogue here and there; I wasn't sorry to see Christopher Walken live, and I certainly didn't hate it as much as Hilton Als did. But it is only scraps that are really funny, there is absolutely nothing to the play as a whole, and I was also extremely irked by the obsequious laughter that seems to greet even the most modestly amusing lines, whether uttered by Walken or anybody else - I felt more and more stony-hearted and irritable as the play proceeded! I loved The Lieutenant of Inishmore, that's the thing, and I was surprised by how inconsequential this play seemed in comparison (I do not think McDonaugh can yet write American dialogue as well as he writes Irish).
I read four more Jacqueline Carey novels (books 4-6 of the Kushiel series, and then Naamah's Kiss - have rejected three other books of hers as not so much to my taste, but alas, this means I am now caught up to where she actual is in the series, I cannot get Naamah's Curse until it is actually published in June!
Then I read three novels by Arnaldur Indridason that I am too lazy to link to separately. These are very good, really thoughtful and beautifully composed - I like the use of flashbacks - though I think his character development is relatively thin. Especially compared to Deon Meyer, whose characters burst off the page in their complex vitality (not the female villains so much, but the male detectives): I really liked Dead Before Dying very much indeed, but I think Devil's Peak is even better.
There is no doubt, however, that crime fiction does not repay binge reading the same way that epic fantasy or historical fiction does - you do no violence to Dorothy Dunnett by reading 13 books of hers all in a row, but if I read three Erlendur mysteries in a row the author's tricks start to seem a little bit threadbare, even if they are good tricks!
Saw three plays.
The one I liked most was Bellona, Destroyer of Cities, an adaptation of Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren (still definitely a work in progress, and distinctly unsettling as a result of its subject matter, but some lovely moments - it is a strange and unsettling vision of the past and the future).
I didn't enjoy Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson as much as Ben Brantley did, though the acting was very good (Colleen Werthmann is hilarious!) and there are at least four or five extremely clever songs.
A Behanding in Spokane was a great disappointment. Some very funny bits of dialogue here and there; I wasn't sorry to see Christopher Walken live, and I certainly didn't hate it as much as Hilton Als did. But it is only scraps that are really funny, there is absolutely nothing to the play as a whole, and I was also extremely irked by the obsequious laughter that seems to greet even the most modestly amusing lines, whether uttered by Walken or anybody else - I felt more and more stony-hearted and irritable as the play proceeded! I loved The Lieutenant of Inishmore, that's the thing, and I was surprised by how inconsequential this play seemed in comparison (I do not think McDonaugh can yet write American dialogue as well as he writes Irish).
I read four more Jacqueline Carey novels (books 4-6 of the Kushiel series, and then Naamah's Kiss - have rejected three other books of hers as not so much to my taste, but alas, this means I am now caught up to where she actual is in the series, I cannot get Naamah's Curse until it is actually published in June!
Then I read three novels by Arnaldur Indridason that I am too lazy to link to separately. These are very good, really thoughtful and beautifully composed - I like the use of flashbacks - though I think his character development is relatively thin. Especially compared to Deon Meyer, whose characters burst off the page in their complex vitality (not the female villains so much, but the male detectives): I really liked Dead Before Dying very much indeed, but I think Devil's Peak is even better.
There is no doubt, however, that crime fiction does not repay binge reading the same way that epic fantasy or historical fiction does - you do no violence to Dorothy Dunnett by reading 13 books of hers all in a row, but if I read three Erlendur mysteries in a row the author's tricks start to seem a little bit threadbare, even if they are good tricks!
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