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There's a Wednesday Every Week
Aug. 1st, 2018 11:51 amWhat I've Finished Reading
A Game of Thrones was just the thing for a long trip, though reading it after watching a season and a half of the TV adaptation felt a little redundant. Basically nothing happened in the book that didn't also happen in the show - except that the young characters are all significantly younger, which alters their characterization a little. Jon Snow, my favorite, is seventeen in the show, but fourteen in the book, which makes him practically a different character while pouting exactly the same amount. Sansa, the character Martin seems determined to punish for being a well-behaved girl with unrealistic ideals, is only eleven, which makes the constant narrative heckling about how Fairy Tales Lied to You even crueler than when she was fourteen.
I enjoyed reading it a little more than I enjoyed watching the show, just because it was a book and reasonably well-written - though I don't know if I'd have stuck with it in the beginning if I hadn't already met and become attached to the characters. I appreciate how Martin has just stuffed a pile of his other favorite nerd tropes (zombies, krakens and the releasing thereof) into a high-fantasy framework and how elegantly he's made it work. I'm also amused by how much incest he wants to write about at all times. He is a Man Who Knows What He Likes and is Not Ashamed.
Also finished: some perfectly inoffensive books of poetry that I won't bother naming because first-book poets don't need to have "perfectly inoffensive" showing up alongside their names in a web search. I backed a couple of publishing Kickstarters a while ago and got a lot of competently designed slim volumes, some of which I'm happy to have read but don't have much to say about.
What I'm Reading Now
It's back to Ulysses and The Life of Samuel Johnson! Sam. Johns. and his young friend Bozzers are writing carefully effusive letters about how much they've missed each other after Boz's long absence, and it's great.
<3
What I Plan to Read Next
Besides the above, I've got five books from my TBR pile to get through, and then I think I'm going to crash into some comfort reading - re-read some LM Montgomery and hop back on the Christie and Sue Grafton trains.
TBR: The Balkans Trilogy (Olivia Manning), Snobbery With Violence (Colin Watson), The Hamlet (W. Faulkner), The Memory-Keeper's Daughter (Kim Edwards), and Jitterbug Perfume (Tom Robbins). The latter is a re-read of a favorite from my adolescence that I've been putting off for a while.
A Game of Thrones was just the thing for a long trip, though reading it after watching a season and a half of the TV adaptation felt a little redundant. Basically nothing happened in the book that didn't also happen in the show - except that the young characters are all significantly younger, which alters their characterization a little. Jon Snow, my favorite, is seventeen in the show, but fourteen in the book, which makes him practically a different character while pouting exactly the same amount. Sansa, the character Martin seems determined to punish for being a well-behaved girl with unrealistic ideals, is only eleven, which makes the constant narrative heckling about how Fairy Tales Lied to You even crueler than when she was fourteen.
I enjoyed reading it a little more than I enjoyed watching the show, just because it was a book and reasonably well-written - though I don't know if I'd have stuck with it in the beginning if I hadn't already met and become attached to the characters. I appreciate how Martin has just stuffed a pile of his other favorite nerd tropes (zombies, krakens and the releasing thereof) into a high-fantasy framework and how elegantly he's made it work. I'm also amused by how much incest he wants to write about at all times. He is a Man Who Knows What He Likes and is Not Ashamed.
Also finished: some perfectly inoffensive books of poetry that I won't bother naming because first-book poets don't need to have "perfectly inoffensive" showing up alongside their names in a web search. I backed a couple of publishing Kickstarters a while ago and got a lot of competently designed slim volumes, some of which I'm happy to have read but don't have much to say about.
What I'm Reading Now
It's back to Ulysses and The Life of Samuel Johnson! Sam. Johns. and his young friend Bozzers are writing carefully effusive letters about how much they've missed each other after Boz's long absence, and it's great.
My Dear Sir -- I can now fully understand those intervals of silence in your correspondence with me, which have often given me anxiety and uneasiness; for although I am conscious that my veneration and love for Mr. Johnson have never in the least abated, yet I have deferred for almost a year and a half to write to him.
Dear Sir -- If you are now able to comprehend that I might neglect to write without diminution of affection, you have taught me, likewise, how that neglect may be uneasily felt without resentment. I wished for your letter a long time, and when it came, it amply recompensed the delay.
<3
What I Plan to Read Next
Besides the above, I've got five books from my TBR pile to get through, and then I think I'm going to crash into some comfort reading - re-read some LM Montgomery and hop back on the Christie and Sue Grafton trains.
TBR: The Balkans Trilogy (Olivia Manning), Snobbery With Violence (Colin Watson), The Hamlet (W. Faulkner), The Memory-Keeper's Daughter (Kim Edwards), and Jitterbug Perfume (Tom Robbins). The latter is a re-read of a favorite from my adolescence that I've been putting off for a while.
