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.)