The Week Without A Wednesday Reading Meme
Dec. 12th, 2018 10:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evelyn_bIt's happened again! This time, I don't even have an excuse like "I was busy" or "family concerns" or "my eyes got burnt out from too much reading"; I just accidentally read a bunch of Kinsey Millhones and forgot to read anything else.
That's not completely accurate: I read a little bit of Poetry December 2018 and a little bit of the New York Review of Books. I'm not sure if I actually like the NYRB all that much, but they lured me in with the promise of a free notebook and it's not like I have enough notebooks. (I have enough notebooks).
Current Kinsey: Q is for Quarry - a dead body was found in a quarry, but Kins and her retired cop friends are also hunters on a cold trail - and probably there's a tertiary meaning not yet obvious, since Grafton likes to throw a wordplay curveball toward the end. We've spent a fair amount of time on a plot I'm not thrilled with - Kinsey's prickly reconciliation with her mother's estranged family - and Grafton seems to be losing her grip on the supporting cast a little. Rosie, the imperious Hungarian barkeep, talks in differently scrambled English in every book, and sometimes from chapter to chapter. Grafton tries to cover her tracks by making it a personality trait, but it looks too much like she's just been revising this whole time. Suddenly everyone's balking at eating Rosie's dinners and making damp comic hay out of her perfectly rational love of organ meats. "Screw you, Rosie's cooking is amazing," I said out loud at one point to the book in my hands. There's been a slow creep toward caricature in Kinsey's inner circle, but maybe it'll get better. First-person narration is a hard bag to drag when you're getting shot at all the time, and sometimes even when you're not. Maybe the Kinster just has a lot on her mind.
That's not completely accurate: I read a little bit of Poetry December 2018 and a little bit of the New York Review of Books. I'm not sure if I actually like the NYRB all that much, but they lured me in with the promise of a free notebook and it's not like I have enough notebooks. (I have enough notebooks).
Current Kinsey: Q is for Quarry - a dead body was found in a quarry, but Kins and her retired cop friends are also hunters on a cold trail - and probably there's a tertiary meaning not yet obvious, since Grafton likes to throw a wordplay curveball toward the end. We've spent a fair amount of time on a plot I'm not thrilled with - Kinsey's prickly reconciliation with her mother's estranged family - and Grafton seems to be losing her grip on the supporting cast a little. Rosie, the imperious Hungarian barkeep, talks in differently scrambled English in every book, and sometimes from chapter to chapter. Grafton tries to cover her tracks by making it a personality trait, but it looks too much like she's just been revising this whole time. Suddenly everyone's balking at eating Rosie's dinners and making damp comic hay out of her perfectly rational love of organ meats. "Screw you, Rosie's cooking is amazing," I said out loud at one point to the book in my hands. There's been a slow creep toward caricature in Kinsey's inner circle, but maybe it'll get better. First-person narration is a hard bag to drag when you're getting shot at all the time, and sometimes even when you're not. Maybe the Kinster just has a lot on her mind.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-12 04:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-12 06:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-19 05:12 pm (UTC)I don't actively dislike the NYRB at all; it's just one of those things I end up feeling I ought to be suspicious of, like George Saunders, because it panders to me too sucessfully. I have a childish complex about being a target audience. I could pretend it's a legitimate criticism of, I don't know, having a really narrow stable of writers or being super predictable in every way (this did begin to wear on me the last time I had a subscription) but really it's just that I have a complex. Anyway, I like predictablity, or I wouldn't keep reading Kinsey Millhones and The Most Comfortable Man in London.
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Date: 2018-12-12 05:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-12 06:28 pm (UTC)