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Wednesday Reading on Thursday
Feb. 13th, 2020 03:26 pmWhat I've Finished Reading
The Wolf and the Girl by Aster Glenn Gray is a historical fantasy novella that takes some cues from Little Red Riding Hood (mostly for the sake of one absolutely fantastic scene involving the protagonist's grandmother, which I won't spoil), and also involves an arty silent film version of Little Red Riding Hood. Basically, Masha's childhood friend Raisa went away to college in St. Petersburg and got mixed up with a group of Satanic anarchists whose head witch turned her into a wolf after she raised the perfectly reasonable question, "What if Satan is an unreliable political ally?" Masha and Raisa do about the only thing they can do under the circumstances, which is run away to Paris and start an animal act.
This is an excellent plot and I enjoyed it, but I came to the end feeling like it could have been half again as long. There's a lot of potential for a more leisurely story, from the lonely journey across a continent to the vaudeville life in Paris, to the unwritten rules for surviving being transformed into a wolf (if Raisa ever eats raw meat in her wolf body, she'll stay a wolf forever, so the poor thing goes hungry a lot). As a casual fan of historical anarchists, I'd also love to see some of the no-doubt epic bickering between the satanic group and their atheist and Tolstoyan counterparts, but that may be just me.
V for Vengeance by Sue Grafton, a re-read (because I knew I'd read it but couldn't remember a thing about it). A decent-enough entry in Grafton's Alphabet of Destruction series, with an overwhelming number of tangled plot threads and more than usually marred by Kinsey/Grafton's weird hangups about the specific number of pounds every single female character needs to lose or gain in order to meet Kinsey's exacting standards.
I read all of Wallace Stevens Collected Poems and still don't know what I think of Wallace Stevens. I also read a possibly genuinely obscure book called The Two Guides and Other Poems by T. M. Sample, privately published by Vesta Sample of Highland Park, Tenn. in 1908 and featuring several not-especially-professional illustrations by the same Vesta (plus one attractive photograph of a creek). The title poem is a long and didactic platter of heroic couplets about the unreliability of science and the importance of religion. There are also some panegyrics about William McKinley and Robert E. Lee, and lots of descriptions of the author's cozy chair by the fire.
What I'm Reading Now
The copy of Don Quixote I ordered STILL hasn't arrived! so I got one from the public library along with my Kinseys, and the only one they had was this extremely seventeenth-century translation by P. A. Motteux with loads of italics and Capital Letters and quote marks that start again at the beginning of every line to remind you that the character is still talking. It's surprisingly likable! Eventually I'll get the other translation and then I can compare, but it hasn't happened yet. I'll probably post more about Don Quixote early next week.
(Wikipedia interrupts this entry to tell me this translation is widely criticized for being overly smug and jaunty, and is from the eighteenth century rather than the seventeenth).
W for Wasted has a homeless man turning up dead on a beach with Kinsey's name and number in his pocket, a perfect excuse for Kinsey to try to ingratiate herself with the local homeless population by buying three packs of cheap cigarettes at the convenience store. Will it work? This one has a washed-up PI in it (not Kinsey, of course, who always manages to pay the bills in spite of being nearly murdered every three months). It's also shaping up to be overrun with the adventures of Kinsey's sexy octegenarian landlord and his family of nonagenarian Midwestern eccentrics, which could be either good or bad. We'll see what the next three hundred pages bring.
What I Plan to Read Next
I don't know for sure! Maybe the "definitive" translation of Don Quixote, if it ever gets here!
The Wolf and the Girl by Aster Glenn Gray is a historical fantasy novella that takes some cues from Little Red Riding Hood (mostly for the sake of one absolutely fantastic scene involving the protagonist's grandmother, which I won't spoil), and also involves an arty silent film version of Little Red Riding Hood. Basically, Masha's childhood friend Raisa went away to college in St. Petersburg and got mixed up with a group of Satanic anarchists whose head witch turned her into a wolf after she raised the perfectly reasonable question, "What if Satan is an unreliable political ally?" Masha and Raisa do about the only thing they can do under the circumstances, which is run away to Paris and start an animal act.
This is an excellent plot and I enjoyed it, but I came to the end feeling like it could have been half again as long. There's a lot of potential for a more leisurely story, from the lonely journey across a continent to the vaudeville life in Paris, to the unwritten rules for surviving being transformed into a wolf (if Raisa ever eats raw meat in her wolf body, she'll stay a wolf forever, so the poor thing goes hungry a lot). As a casual fan of historical anarchists, I'd also love to see some of the no-doubt epic bickering between the satanic group and their atheist and Tolstoyan counterparts, but that may be just me.
V for Vengeance by Sue Grafton, a re-read (because I knew I'd read it but couldn't remember a thing about it). A decent-enough entry in Grafton's Alphabet of Destruction series, with an overwhelming number of tangled plot threads and more than usually marred by Kinsey/Grafton's weird hangups about the specific number of pounds every single female character needs to lose or gain in order to meet Kinsey's exacting standards.
I read all of Wallace Stevens Collected Poems and still don't know what I think of Wallace Stevens. I also read a possibly genuinely obscure book called The Two Guides and Other Poems by T. M. Sample, privately published by Vesta Sample of Highland Park, Tenn. in 1908 and featuring several not-especially-professional illustrations by the same Vesta (plus one attractive photograph of a creek). The title poem is a long and didactic platter of heroic couplets about the unreliability of science and the importance of religion. There are also some panegyrics about William McKinley and Robert E. Lee, and lots of descriptions of the author's cozy chair by the fire.
What I'm Reading Now
As for the Giant Morgante, he always spoke very civil Things of him; for though he was one of that monstrous Brood, who ever were intolerably proud and brutish, he still behav'd himself like a civil and well-bred Person.
The copy of Don Quixote I ordered STILL hasn't arrived! so I got one from the public library along with my Kinseys, and the only one they had was this extremely seventeenth-century translation by P. A. Motteux with loads of italics and Capital Letters and quote marks that start again at the beginning of every line to remind you that the character is still talking. It's surprisingly likable! Eventually I'll get the other translation and then I can compare, but it hasn't happened yet. I'll probably post more about Don Quixote early next week.
(Wikipedia interrupts this entry to tell me this translation is widely criticized for being overly smug and jaunty, and is from the eighteenth century rather than the seventeenth).
W for Wasted has a homeless man turning up dead on a beach with Kinsey's name and number in his pocket, a perfect excuse for Kinsey to try to ingratiate herself with the local homeless population by buying three packs of cheap cigarettes at the convenience store. Will it work? This one has a washed-up PI in it (not Kinsey, of course, who always manages to pay the bills in spite of being nearly murdered every three months). It's also shaping up to be overrun with the adventures of Kinsey's sexy octegenarian landlord and his family of nonagenarian Midwestern eccentrics, which could be either good or bad. We'll see what the next three hundred pages bring.
What I Plan to Read Next
I don't know for sure! Maybe the "definitive" translation of Don Quixote, if it ever gets here!
