Thursday is the New Wednesday Reading
Nov. 22nd, 2018 11:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evelyn_bWhat I've Finished Reading
Hungry Hearts by Francine Prose - a book I bought because the cover made it look like a vampire romance, and I had a vague but strong sense that Francine Prose was not a vampire author. It's actually a delightful story about a young actress in the Yiddish Art Theater who accidentally gets possessed by a dybbuk while starring in a play called The Dybbuk, and how the problem is finally solved. It's as light and tidy as a paper lantern. The cover, as it turns out, is literally accurate - it shows Dinah and her leading man in their circa 1922 stage costumes - but nevertheless misleading.
I found The Old Men at the Zoo curiously unmoving for a black comedy about mass animal death, and I'm not sure why. I didn't hate it, even when it seemed to be actively courting my dislike (e.g. with the grisly death of the Director's nymphomaniacal daughter, which wanted so badly to be nasty and gratuitous and which I could only receive as harmlessly artificial) and I didn't love it, though all the sentences are perfectly sound. If you like futures past, this is an interesting one: published in 1961, it takes place in the early 1970s and "feels" about ten years older than it is, in spite of the Brexit War that drives most of the destruction. Time will tell whether it grows on me or not.
What I'm Reading Now
Patrick White's Riders in the Chariot is fantastic so far, though I haven't gotten very far. Miss Hare lives all alone in her father's huge crumbling stone house (called Xanadu) at the end of a track the council keeps hopefully renaming a road, with her fears and her memories all scattered like debris in its dozens of unused rooms. A no-nonsense housekeeper has just arrived. Will they become unlikely friends, or will they just go on shooting cryptic remarks at each other in their mutually barely-comprehensible idioms for 500 pages? I don't know! But I am very excited to find out! This book takes place in Australia, sometime after the Second World War (or, as these characters call it, the Second War).
What I Plan to Read Next
I'm not sure! About the same as last week, I think.
Hungry Hearts by Francine Prose - a book I bought because the cover made it look like a vampire romance, and I had a vague but strong sense that Francine Prose was not a vampire author. It's actually a delightful story about a young actress in the Yiddish Art Theater who accidentally gets possessed by a dybbuk while starring in a play called The Dybbuk, and how the problem is finally solved. It's as light and tidy as a paper lantern. The cover, as it turns out, is literally accurate - it shows Dinah and her leading man in their circa 1922 stage costumes - but nevertheless misleading.
I found The Old Men at the Zoo curiously unmoving for a black comedy about mass animal death, and I'm not sure why. I didn't hate it, even when it seemed to be actively courting my dislike (e.g. with the grisly death of the Director's nymphomaniacal daughter, which wanted so badly to be nasty and gratuitous and which I could only receive as harmlessly artificial) and I didn't love it, though all the sentences are perfectly sound. If you like futures past, this is an interesting one: published in 1961, it takes place in the early 1970s and "feels" about ten years older than it is, in spite of the Brexit War that drives most of the destruction. Time will tell whether it grows on me or not.
What I'm Reading Now
Patrick White's Riders in the Chariot is fantastic so far, though I haven't gotten very far. Miss Hare lives all alone in her father's huge crumbling stone house (called Xanadu) at the end of a track the council keeps hopefully renaming a road, with her fears and her memories all scattered like debris in its dozens of unused rooms. A no-nonsense housekeeper has just arrived. Will they become unlikely friends, or will they just go on shooting cryptic remarks at each other in their mutually barely-comprehensible idioms for 500 pages? I don't know! But I am very excited to find out! This book takes place in Australia, sometime after the Second World War (or, as these characters call it, the Second War).
What I Plan to Read Next
I'm not sure! About the same as last week, I think.
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