The End of the End of the Wednesday
Jul. 8th, 2020 08:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evelyn_bA semi-placeholder for an oddly un-book-friendly week:
Some Books I Finished
The Time-Traveling Popcorn Ball took a sharp turn near the end for the sad and spooky, but it got out of it all right - sort of. There's a whole additional (and very different) story to be written about what comes next. I hopeasakiyume and I are right about this book's future cult status so we can read some carefully imagined Yuletide stories about Rosie and Piper in about a decade.
I got to like From Fact to Fiction quite a bit by the end - what I didn't pick up on at first was that all the short stories under dissection are by Edmund Ware - an extremely prolific writer who does perfectly good work and whose present obscurity is probably just. There's a lot of discussion of magazine markets that don't exist anymore - slicks and pulps and so on - plus advice that applies equally to any time, like "no one likes an author who thinks he's slumming for quick cash."
Currently Reading
I finally got around to starting The Aeneid (verse translation by Rolf Humphries) after many years of not reading it for a very silly reason: because it's a Troy-adjacent epic poem in imitation of Homer and I felt sure it wasn't going to be as good as The Iliad. Actually, it's fine! It's written by a well-attested single author in a relatively literate age with plenty of sources, but you can't hold that against a book.
The End of the End of the Earth is a book of essays by Jonathan Franzen, mostly about birds. Franzen the author has been eluding me for many years because every time I pick up one of his novels I get overwhelmed by an awareness of the thousands of other books I could be reading instead. This one is short and was already in the house and it turns out I love it. The Franz is smart, cranky, fretful, and interesting; if he also sometimes wastes a lot of time responding to years-old book drama I don't care about, well, that's a kind of human nature, probably, and Franz is a human guy. Does this mean I'll eventually be able to open one of his novels without immediately putting it down? I hope so.
Next Up
The Amen Corner (a play), Trouble on Triton (a novel), probably some other things.
Some Books I Finished
The Time-Traveling Popcorn Ball took a sharp turn near the end for the sad and spooky, but it got out of it all right - sort of. There's a whole additional (and very different) story to be written about what comes next. I hope
asakiyume and I are right about this book's future cult status so we can read some carefully imagined Yuletide stories about Rosie and Piper in about a decade. I got to like From Fact to Fiction quite a bit by the end - what I didn't pick up on at first was that all the short stories under dissection are by Edmund Ware - an extremely prolific writer who does perfectly good work and whose present obscurity is probably just. There's a lot of discussion of magazine markets that don't exist anymore - slicks and pulps and so on - plus advice that applies equally to any time, like "no one likes an author who thinks he's slumming for quick cash."
Currently Reading
I finally got around to starting The Aeneid (verse translation by Rolf Humphries) after many years of not reading it for a very silly reason: because it's a Troy-adjacent epic poem in imitation of Homer and I felt sure it wasn't going to be as good as The Iliad. Actually, it's fine! It's written by a well-attested single author in a relatively literate age with plenty of sources, but you can't hold that against a book.
The End of the End of the Earth is a book of essays by Jonathan Franzen, mostly about birds. Franzen the author has been eluding me for many years because every time I pick up one of his novels I get overwhelmed by an awareness of the thousands of other books I could be reading instead. This one is short and was already in the house and it turns out I love it. The Franz is smart, cranky, fretful, and interesting; if he also sometimes wastes a lot of time responding to years-old book drama I don't care about, well, that's a kind of human nature, probably, and Franz is a human guy. Does this mean I'll eventually be able to open one of his novels without immediately putting it down? I hope so.
Next Up
The Amen Corner (a play), Trouble on Triton (a novel), probably some other things.
