Light reading catch-up

I seem to be more than usually reading too many different books, out of restlessness and mental dissatisfaction...

The feeling of understimulation drove me to begin (but not [yet] to finish, as neither quite struck my fancy, though the Delany is surprisingly page-turnery and the Home is, bizarrely, a book that seems to have been written exactly for someone with my reading history!) the two novels hanging around that seemed most likely to tickle the brain follicles, Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren and Stewart Home's 69 Things To Do With a Dead Princess.

Polished off Lynda LaPlante's Clean Cut, which seemed to me better than the last mystery of hers I read, but had to chunk across the room in disgust the Royal Flush - Sleeping Cruelty omnibus due to utter unreadable trashiness.

Read Robert Harris's Pompeii during a couple hours of downtime on Wednesday afternoon, found it really rather good - it is a simple book, simpler I think than the Cicero series, but Harris really has the gift of storytelling and bestsellery pacing, something I admire and envy.

Finished Ambler and a couple other things that were hanging around, plus the Tristram Shandy reread (it is not truly a funny book, but Sterne is an interesting recapitulator and innovator); also dipping into Temple Grandin's book on animals and Scott McCloud's truly excellent Understanding Comics, about which more anon.

Will shortly head over to the Humane Society Book Loft to offload some of these volumes and see if I can pick out some good new ones.

"Shakespeare, Shakespeare, Shakespeare"

Matthew Cheney interviews Samuel R. Delany at Omnivoracious. The occasion: a new edition of The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction.

(Great interview! Sentences I most like, out of many other very good ones: "I wanted a book I—that is to say, we—could read and enjoy. So I wrote it." Delany is in my opinion one of the great geniuses of our time, as a critic as well as a fiction-writer - here were some thoughts of mine from a few years ago on his collection of pieces on writing. This bit, which I have come back to again and again over the last few years in my teaching, my fiction-writing and my critical writing, is almost certainly going to be either an epigraph for or a prominent feature in the introduction to A Bread-and-Butter Theory of the Novel...)

(Interview link courtesy of the king of all things capybara.)

(NB I am not surprised Delany has been teaching The Princesse de Cleves - it is essential reading! I am looking forward to teaching Flaubert in the fall myself...)