Catch-up

Mondays are taxing this semester!

Finished reading Victor LaValle's The Devil in Silver.  It is a strange book; I liked it a good deal, but it also made me feel moderately perplexed much of the time I was reading (not a disagreeable feeling).  Wished he did not feature sudden one-paragraph shifts to different viewpoint character, but that is just a tic of mine, to find such shifts induce something like motion sickness.  Made me feel grateful I have never been institutionalized.

Then: J. K. Rowling, The Casual Vacancy!  Curiosity makes us do strange things; I could not resist reading it, though it is not so much my kind of book and I think they have priced the Kindle edition too high ($17.99).  It's fine, but lightning didn't strike twice.

(I recommend instead, if you like that sort of thing, one of Jilly Cooper's epic village novels - she is less good than Rowling with characterization, but she gives you more characters to root for, and the dogs and cats in her books are very fully realized! - in fact this novel is sort of the weird double of Cooper's Wicked!...)

Also recommended, as an "instead" rather than an "as well": Peyton Place! (In this case the exclamation point is my own.)

Light reading catch-up (more Kindle)

Another novel from the heavenly pen of Ken Bruen, The Devil.

Sigrid Nunez' lovely novel (could have been published as YA!) Salvation City; she is always worth reading, this one is startlingly different in tone and subject matter from the last book of hers I read but it is of a kind I very much like.

Camilla Lackberg's The Ice Princess: not bad but a bit so-so.

Jennifer Lynn Barnes's Raised By Wolves, highly readable but built more on a paranormal romance chassis than on a young-adult or urban fantasy one.

And a non-Kindle tome: Jilly Cooper's Jump. Not a patch on the best of her earlier books, but still an enjoyable read. It is no discredit to the book as a whole to say that she writes animal characters particularly well, and that the star of the cast is a goat!

I continue to languish in bed with a highly undesirable and glumness-inducing lung ailment...

Jump!

Jilly Cooper has a new book coming out next month! It is hard to explain why her books are so delightful, but this blog entry does give a little bit of the flavor - hmmm, I wish I had that book right now...