Wednesday Waking Dreams
Dec. 2nd, 2015 12:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evelyn_bWhat I've Finished Reading
The Group is magnificent. I loved it 100% of the time. I think I want to defer talking about it for a bit, but it is just my cup of sludgy journalistic tea. Funny, uncomfortable, cruel and kind, hyper-vivid and intimate in the way only a novel can be.
And my plan to read How Far Can You Go? after Titus Groan was a bust, because I finished it in about a day and I'm hardly another fifty pages into Titus Groan, but oh well. It was good. I was a little wary of David Lodge because in his "Art of Writing Fiction" he 1) used a passage of his own writing for the "humor" chapter that 2) did not make me laugh, but How Far Can You Go? was completely engrossing and surprisingly earnest. The back-cover copy makes it sound a little more cynical than it is. Actually, it strikes an impressive balance between sympathy and humor, culminating in a description of the ill-fated Catholics for an Open Church Paschal Festival (complete with liturgical dance and speaking in tongues) in which every eccentricity has been carefully accounted for with some character's personal, often painful experience.
Also read in a day because I couldn't stop once I'd started: Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
What I'm Reading Now
Titus Groan has a plot now, sort of! At least, the kitchen-boy Steerpike has escaped from the room he was locked in, climbed all over the walls of the castle, and tumbled into Fuchsia's private tower hideaway, and is now squirming his way into a cushy non-kitchen job with Prunesquallor and his wife.
Unfortunately, my interest in Steerpike has withered a little now that he's begun to talk. But I love Fuchsia more every time she appears. This is not really a book about characters you love -- it's more like a hilarious nightmare based on several creepy animated movies mashed together -- but I can't help myself. She's a spoiled, neglected, aggressively lonely, fierce and pitiful teenager. She and Kay from The Once and Future King should be best friends, so the adults around each of them will have someone to blame.
What I'm Going to Read Next
Got The Light and the Dark (next up in C. P. Snow's eleven-novel sequence!) from the library, so that's waiting to go. And I've got this book about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake I've been meaning to read. I'm hoping to use my Christmas vacation to plow through my TBR pile, at least the part of it that takes place after Yuletide fics are due.
The Group is magnificent. I loved it 100% of the time. I think I want to defer talking about it for a bit, but it is just my cup of sludgy journalistic tea. Funny, uncomfortable, cruel and kind, hyper-vivid and intimate in the way only a novel can be.
And my plan to read How Far Can You Go? after Titus Groan was a bust, because I finished it in about a day and I'm hardly another fifty pages into Titus Groan, but oh well. It was good. I was a little wary of David Lodge because in his "Art of Writing Fiction" he 1) used a passage of his own writing for the "humor" chapter that 2) did not make me laugh, but How Far Can You Go? was completely engrossing and surprisingly earnest. The back-cover copy makes it sound a little more cynical than it is. Actually, it strikes an impressive balance between sympathy and humor, culminating in a description of the ill-fated Catholics for an Open Church Paschal Festival (complete with liturgical dance and speaking in tongues) in which every eccentricity has been carefully accounted for with some character's personal, often painful experience.
Also read in a day because I couldn't stop once I'd started: Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
What I'm Reading Now
Titus Groan has a plot now, sort of! At least, the kitchen-boy Steerpike has escaped from the room he was locked in, climbed all over the walls of the castle, and tumbled into Fuchsia's private tower hideaway, and is now squirming his way into a cushy non-kitchen job with Prunesquallor and his wife.
Unfortunately, my interest in Steerpike has withered a little now that he's begun to talk. But I love Fuchsia more every time she appears. This is not really a book about characters you love -- it's more like a hilarious nightmare based on several creepy animated movies mashed together -- but I can't help myself. She's a spoiled, neglected, aggressively lonely, fierce and pitiful teenager. She and Kay from The Once and Future King should be best friends, so the adults around each of them will have someone to blame.
What I'm Going to Read Next
Got The Light and the Dark (next up in C. P. Snow's eleven-novel sequence!) from the library, so that's waiting to go. And I've got this book about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake I've been meaning to read. I'm hoping to use my Christmas vacation to plow through my TBR pile, at least the part of it that takes place after Yuletide fics are due.
