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Wednesday Read and Run
Jun. 1st, 2016 02:53 pmArchived from Livejournal
A minimal Reading Wednesday for my minimal Internet connection. Maybe I'll catch up next week? We'll see!
What I've Finished Reading
Scenes from Provincial Life:
Alas, no! This was a likable book about realistically selfish people in their twenties. I enjoyed watching everyone quietly tie themselves into knots trying to make themselves each other's lodestars and getting bewildered and hurt when it didn't work. I think I'll have more to say about it next week, or sometime (or so I keep saying).
I loved Guards! Guards! and will definitely have more to say about it soon.
What I Gave Up On with Some Regret
I took To Say Nothing of the Dog back to the library without finishing it. I liked the premise of a badly-run time travel department accidentally time-dislocating a cat and the promise of a a lot of Jerome K. Jerome homages, but a hundred pages in, it still wasn't really knitting together and had been feeling a little labored for a while. I don't know if that's accurate, or if it's just suffering by comparison to Guards! Guards!, which is incredibly quick and very funny.
It's also the second book in a series, I think? So possibly I would have a better sense of the narrator and his setting (a future where cats are extinct?) if I'd read the earlier book. But the earlier book is a very long story about time-traveling through the Black Death and I didn't want to read that; I wanted to read a funny book about boats. I'll try again later (how much later, I'm not sure).
What I'm Reading Now
The Disenchanted by Bud Schulberg, a story about Fictional Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood. It's too undisguised even to qualify as a roman a clef, and too early to tell whether this will make me angry or sad, or both. So far, besides having a different name, the most important difference between Original Scott Fitzgerald and Fictional Scott Fitzgerald is that the latter's book titles are much, much worse.
What I Plan to Read Next
99 Novels has two multi-volume sets for me in 1951, A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell and A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight by Henry Williamson -- plus more C. P. Snow. Why so many multi-volume sets, Burgess?
A minimal Reading Wednesday for my minimal Internet connection. Maybe I'll catch up next week? We'll see!
What I've Finished Reading
Scenes from Provincial Life:
At this time my deepest feelings crowded round two activities -- one was writing books, the other making love to Myrtle. I thought she made it only too clear that she did not care at all for the first. I would gladly have thrashed her for it. Unfortunately, thrashing your young woman does not make her admire you more as a novelist.
Alas, no! This was a likable book about realistically selfish people in their twenties. I enjoyed watching everyone quietly tie themselves into knots trying to make themselves each other's lodestars and getting bewildered and hurt when it didn't work. I think I'll have more to say about it next week, or sometime (or so I keep saying).
I loved Guards! Guards! and will definitely have more to say about it soon.
What I Gave Up On with Some Regret
I took To Say Nothing of the Dog back to the library without finishing it. I liked the premise of a badly-run time travel department accidentally time-dislocating a cat and the promise of a a lot of Jerome K. Jerome homages, but a hundred pages in, it still wasn't really knitting together and had been feeling a little labored for a while. I don't know if that's accurate, or if it's just suffering by comparison to Guards! Guards!, which is incredibly quick and very funny.
It's also the second book in a series, I think? So possibly I would have a better sense of the narrator and his setting (a future where cats are extinct?) if I'd read the earlier book. But the earlier book is a very long story about time-traveling through the Black Death and I didn't want to read that; I wanted to read a funny book about boats. I'll try again later (how much later, I'm not sure).
What I'm Reading Now
The Disenchanted by Bud Schulberg, a story about Fictional Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood. It's too undisguised even to qualify as a roman a clef, and too early to tell whether this will make me angry or sad, or both. So far, besides having a different name, the most important difference between Original Scott Fitzgerald and Fictional Scott Fitzgerald is that the latter's book titles are much, much worse.
What I Plan to Read Next
99 Novels has two multi-volume sets for me in 1951, A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell and A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight by Henry Williamson -- plus more C. P. Snow. Why so many multi-volume sets, Burgess?
