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Among the Wanton Wednesdays Strays
May. 13th, 2020 01:24 pmWhat I've Finished Reading
Book-club consensus on Offshore was that it had a beautiful structure and characters no one could tell apart, but I liked Tilda and Martha, the unnatural children of an inadvertently unconventional upbringing. Everyone in Offshore lives on their own boat moored to the side of the Thames, most of them badly patched, all of them cramped, one being used as a storage unit for stolen goods. The boat-dwellers try to exercise control over their lives but every day the tide comes in and knocks everything around. It's very short, sometimes very funny, and so apparently seamless it's hard to quote from (I say to excuse my laziness).
Also difficult to quote from is The Loneliest Band in France, the aforementioned long-sentence-having novella. I'm sorry to say that I misreported an important detail last week; the first sentence is not fifty-six pages long but thirty-six, so only a little more than half the length of the book. If you were worrying about why Dylan Fisher didn't just keep the party going, I hope this new more correct information eases your mind. I had to read it over again to be sure what I thought of it (the galloping sentence structure has interesting effects on reading speed and, evidently, on remembering what page things happened on), but have concluded that I still like it. The gimmick of the story is there's this band that figured out how to kill people with music, but it's more of a jittery prose poem with that gimmick as its catalyst than anything else.
What I'm Reading Now
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, a book first published in 1841, is unexpectedly ideal comfort reading. The prose is pleasantly smooth and slow without being ornate, so that the act of reading it is relaxing in itself. So far there have been leisurely accounts of two early instances of stock-market "bubbles," a brief detour into the tulip craze, and a strolling tour through the annals of alchemy. The only real drawback is that Charles MacKay, LL.D., lived in an incompletely cited age, and the book is teeming with claims that cry out for a footnote and are given none. (There are a few, but not enough).
How sad is it that midway through a misogynist pamphlet that set seventeenth-century England ON FIRE with indignation (at least for a year or two, in the very small subset of England that wrote pamphlets), I found myself thinking, "This isn't so bad"? Joseph Swetnam, author of The Arraignment of Lewde, idle, froward, and unconstant women: Or the vanitie of them, choose you whether and subject of at least one play in which women beat him up for his libels, hasn't produced a towering flight of rancid imagination like you find in the best-quality misogyny, and unlike some of our local boys he's not enmeshed within any complicated conspiracy theories in which every ordinary interaction is secretly part of an enormous global machine designed to prevent him from getting laid; he's just a not terribly brilliant guy who's upset that women be shopping. This is almost as soothing a read as Extraordinary Popular Delusions, mostly because it's a facsimile and the devil-may-care orthography forces the eye to slow way, way down.
The Star Fraction is another book-club book. I'm not quite feeling it, but it's still the closest I've come to understanding and/or caring what happened in a cyberpunk setting. I said this in real life and was informed that it's not really cyberpunk because [probably very interesting fine distinctions I have not retained], but it has that same slangy, cluttered, ten-worldbuilding-details-to-a-sentence energy and people are constantly logging on to terminals to upload this and that. It's just picked up considerably because the character I cared about (a refugee from the fundamentalist microstate Beulah City) has just teamed up with the two characters I didn't care about as much, so now EVERY CHAPTER will have my guy in it and it's a huge relief.
What I Plan to Read Next
I ordered a random "blind date book" from my local bookstore, and now I have it. Can you believe they sent me exactly the same one I bought the first time? Yes, Be Frank With Me is back. No regrets; I'm happy to support the store, BUT. That book was bad. Was it, possibly, the fun kind of bad? I haven't decided whether I'm going to read it again or not. I'm feeling cantankerous, so maybe yes.
Book-club consensus on Offshore was that it had a beautiful structure and characters no one could tell apart, but I liked Tilda and Martha, the unnatural children of an inadvertently unconventional upbringing. Everyone in Offshore lives on their own boat moored to the side of the Thames, most of them badly patched, all of them cramped, one being used as a storage unit for stolen goods. The boat-dwellers try to exercise control over their lives but every day the tide comes in and knocks everything around. It's very short, sometimes very funny, and so apparently seamless it's hard to quote from (I say to excuse my laziness).
Also difficult to quote from is The Loneliest Band in France, the aforementioned long-sentence-having novella. I'm sorry to say that I misreported an important detail last week; the first sentence is not fifty-six pages long but thirty-six, so only a little more than half the length of the book. If you were worrying about why Dylan Fisher didn't just keep the party going, I hope this new more correct information eases your mind. I had to read it over again to be sure what I thought of it (the galloping sentence structure has interesting effects on reading speed and, evidently, on remembering what page things happened on), but have concluded that I still like it. The gimmick of the story is there's this band that figured out how to kill people with music, but it's more of a jittery prose poem with that gimmick as its catalyst than anything else.
What I'm Reading Now
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, a book first published in 1841, is unexpectedly ideal comfort reading. The prose is pleasantly smooth and slow without being ornate, so that the act of reading it is relaxing in itself. So far there have been leisurely accounts of two early instances of stock-market "bubbles," a brief detour into the tulip craze, and a strolling tour through the annals of alchemy. The only real drawback is that Charles MacKay, LL.D., lived in an incompletely cited age, and the book is teeming with claims that cry out for a footnote and are given none. (There are a few, but not enough).
How sad is it that midway through a misogynist pamphlet that set seventeenth-century England ON FIRE with indignation (at least for a year or two, in the very small subset of England that wrote pamphlets), I found myself thinking, "This isn't so bad"? Joseph Swetnam, author of The Arraignment of Lewde, idle, froward, and unconstant women: Or the vanitie of them, choose you whether and subject of at least one play in which women beat him up for his libels, hasn't produced a towering flight of rancid imagination like you find in the best-quality misogyny, and unlike some of our local boys he's not enmeshed within any complicated conspiracy theories in which every ordinary interaction is secretly part of an enormous global machine designed to prevent him from getting laid; he's just a not terribly brilliant guy who's upset that women be shopping. This is almost as soothing a read as Extraordinary Popular Delusions, mostly because it's a facsimile and the devil-may-care orthography forces the eye to slow way, way down.
The Star Fraction is another book-club book. I'm not quite feeling it, but it's still the closest I've come to understanding and/or caring what happened in a cyberpunk setting. I said this in real life and was informed that it's not really cyberpunk because [probably very interesting fine distinctions I have not retained], but it has that same slangy, cluttered, ten-worldbuilding-details-to-a-sentence energy and people are constantly logging on to terminals to upload this and that. It's just picked up considerably because the character I cared about (a refugee from the fundamentalist microstate Beulah City) has just teamed up with the two characters I didn't care about as much, so now EVERY CHAPTER will have my guy in it and it's a huge relief.
What I Plan to Read Next
I ordered a random "blind date book" from my local bookstore, and now I have it. Can you believe they sent me exactly the same one I bought the first time? Yes, Be Frank With Me is back. No regrets; I'm happy to support the store, BUT. That book was bad. Was it, possibly, the fun kind of bad? I haven't decided whether I'm going to read it again or not. I'm feeling cantankerous, so maybe yes.
