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And Besides, The Wednesday is Dead
Dec. 19th, 2018 10:40 amWhat I've Finished Reading
Most of the books I get from the library are closed up in blank library binding, so it's always a surprise - and a distinctively different reading experience - when I get one with the effusive publisher's description intact. I had no idea going into Riders in the Chariot what kind of book I was in for, but The Fox in the Attic announced right off the bat that it was going to be "a tale of enormous suspense and growing horror," that its hapless upper-class would-be twenty-three-year-old hermit is going to be suspected of murdering the child whose body he finds in the woods, and that Adolf Hitler will appear as a character. This is a great deal of information to have at the start of a book. I don't feel like I was "spoiled" or anything, but it's different from going in blind. I find myself mentally peering around the next corner for the thing the back cover told me about.
After the embarrassing spectacle of the Munich Putsch, all the local sophisticates are relived that at least now no one will have to waste another precious second talking about Hitler ever again. This heavy fish-slap of dramatic irony is intended to upset me and it succeeds. Hitler isn't embarassed by the same things you are, sophisticates!
The latest issue of the New York Review of Books has a review by Anne Diebel of Merve Enre's biography of the inventor/marketers of the Myers-Briggs test. Diebel notes in a throwaway parenthetical that Katherine Cook Briggs became obsessed with Carl Jung, "about whom she began writing gay erotica." Does the biography include any samples of Briggs' fanfiction? The review doesn't say.
Q is for Quarry is a heavily fictionalized (and fanciful) reimagining of a real cold case that Sue Grafton talked about with her pals at the Santa Monica PD, and it ends with an author's note asking for information on the real case, with some facial reconstruction images of the Jane Doe. I'm not sure how I feel about this.
S is for Silence marks the second time someone has tried to kill Kins with heavy equipment, and I've lost count of how many times our girl has killed someone in self-defense. Part of me wishes these last-minute chase scenes were a little less silly. In a way their silliness acts as an additional tone preservative for the series. No matter how grim the circumstances surrounding the muder, you can always count on the buried strains of Yakkity Sax to whisper through the bones of the dirge, reminding you that all of these tragedies are only gears in a music box, manufactured to please.
(The real reason for all the last-chapter madness: the investigation has to end sometime and the Kinster isn't authorized to arrest anyone, so we might as well have an Exciting Shootout I guess).
What I'm Reading Now
T is for Trespass makes the bold claim to be Grafton's darkest mystery yet! Once again, I have a cover-flap and enthusiastic blurbs to fill me up with expectations - plus an author's note about the story we're about to experience, warning us not to be too alarmed by all the Depths of Human Evil within - so I know it's going to be about identity theft and elder abuse. Grafton tried her hand at a little Killer POV in S is for Silence (along with a bunch of other Flashback POVs), and made it reasonably non-annoying. There's some Identity Theif POV here. Meanwhile, Kinsey's inexplicably sexy octegenarian landlord has taken up with a weirdly predatory real estate agent. He's suspicious of her motives, but Kins keeps telling him to give her another chance, for no clear reason other than to push a subplot into motion. It's ok so far!
(I'd like to note that I do not approve of the Alphabet of Destruction's sudden swerve into product placement. Round about R is for Ricochet, Kins started waxing appreciative of "Big Macs and QPs with Cheese" and now there's a Mcdonald's ad practically every chapter. This isn't especially out of character for Kinsey, but it's noticeable - especially as she continues to use coy generic names for other fast-food products, such as "franchised fried chicken" - and I would like it to stop).
Another Country is a 99 Novels selection for 1962. James Baldwin's fiction is a very different reading experience from his nonfiction. His misogyny gets a more thorough airing, and his dialogue is unexpectedly clumsy. A hundred pages in, Another Country is gritty, confused, damp and complicated. It's one of those books where I keep compulsively sticking little post-its of distance and criticism all over the surface of my involvement and they keep falling off in a melancholy dead-leaf motion.
What I Plan to Read Next
Interlibrary loan came through with The Innocent Moon, so it's Henry Williamson time (again)! When I go to visit my family at Christmas, I'll probably bring a couple of my more disposable paperbacks, but I'm not sure which ones yet.
ETA I just counted up my remaining 99 Novels, and there are only 48 books left on the list! (Seven of which are volumes in the "single" Henry Williamson "novel" A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight). Do you know what that means? It means I'll be able to actually finish the list in 2019! Even if it takes me four months to read Ancient Evenings! That will make five full years of reading Anthony Burgess' idiosyncratic favorites. I wonder what I'll do when it's all over.
Most of the books I get from the library are closed up in blank library binding, so it's always a surprise - and a distinctively different reading experience - when I get one with the effusive publisher's description intact. I had no idea going into Riders in the Chariot what kind of book I was in for, but The Fox in the Attic announced right off the bat that it was going to be "a tale of enormous suspense and growing horror," that its hapless upper-class would-be twenty-three-year-old hermit is going to be suspected of murdering the child whose body he finds in the woods, and that Adolf Hitler will appear as a character. This is a great deal of information to have at the start of a book. I don't feel like I was "spoiled" or anything, but it's different from going in blind. I find myself mentally peering around the next corner for the thing the back cover told me about.
After the embarrassing spectacle of the Munich Putsch, all the local sophisticates are relived that at least now no one will have to waste another precious second talking about Hitler ever again. This heavy fish-slap of dramatic irony is intended to upset me and it succeeds. Hitler isn't embarassed by the same things you are, sophisticates!
The latest issue of the New York Review of Books has a review by Anne Diebel of Merve Enre's biography of the inventor/marketers of the Myers-Briggs test. Diebel notes in a throwaway parenthetical that Katherine Cook Briggs became obsessed with Carl Jung, "about whom she began writing gay erotica." Does the biography include any samples of Briggs' fanfiction? The review doesn't say.
Q is for Quarry is a heavily fictionalized (and fanciful) reimagining of a real cold case that Sue Grafton talked about with her pals at the Santa Monica PD, and it ends with an author's note asking for information on the real case, with some facial reconstruction images of the Jane Doe. I'm not sure how I feel about this.
S is for Silence marks the second time someone has tried to kill Kins with heavy equipment, and I've lost count of how many times our girl has killed someone in self-defense. Part of me wishes these last-minute chase scenes were a little less silly. In a way their silliness acts as an additional tone preservative for the series. No matter how grim the circumstances surrounding the muder, you can always count on the buried strains of Yakkity Sax to whisper through the bones of the dirge, reminding you that all of these tragedies are only gears in a music box, manufactured to please.
(The real reason for all the last-chapter madness: the investigation has to end sometime and the Kinster isn't authorized to arrest anyone, so we might as well have an Exciting Shootout I guess).
What I'm Reading Now
T is for Trespass makes the bold claim to be Grafton's darkest mystery yet! Once again, I have a cover-flap and enthusiastic blurbs to fill me up with expectations - plus an author's note about the story we're about to experience, warning us not to be too alarmed by all the Depths of Human Evil within - so I know it's going to be about identity theft and elder abuse. Grafton tried her hand at a little Killer POV in S is for Silence (along with a bunch of other Flashback POVs), and made it reasonably non-annoying. There's some Identity Theif POV here. Meanwhile, Kinsey's inexplicably sexy octegenarian landlord has taken up with a weirdly predatory real estate agent. He's suspicious of her motives, but Kins keeps telling him to give her another chance, for no clear reason other than to push a subplot into motion. It's ok so far!
(I'd like to note that I do not approve of the Alphabet of Destruction's sudden swerve into product placement. Round about R is for Ricochet, Kins started waxing appreciative of "Big Macs and QPs with Cheese" and now there's a Mcdonald's ad practically every chapter. This isn't especially out of character for Kinsey, but it's noticeable - especially as she continues to use coy generic names for other fast-food products, such as "franchised fried chicken" - and I would like it to stop).
Another Country is a 99 Novels selection for 1962. James Baldwin's fiction is a very different reading experience from his nonfiction. His misogyny gets a more thorough airing, and his dialogue is unexpectedly clumsy. A hundred pages in, Another Country is gritty, confused, damp and complicated. It's one of those books where I keep compulsively sticking little post-its of distance and criticism all over the surface of my involvement and they keep falling off in a melancholy dead-leaf motion.
What I Plan to Read Next
Interlibrary loan came through with The Innocent Moon, so it's Henry Williamson time (again)! When I go to visit my family at Christmas, I'll probably bring a couple of my more disposable paperbacks, but I'm not sure which ones yet.
ETA I just counted up my remaining 99 Novels, and there are only 48 books left on the list! (Seven of which are volumes in the "single" Henry Williamson "novel" A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight). Do you know what that means? It means I'll be able to actually finish the list in 2019! Even if it takes me four months to read Ancient Evenings! That will make five full years of reading Anthony Burgess' idiosyncratic favorites. I wonder what I'll do when it's all over.
