evelyn_b

What I've Finished Reading

Nine Horses by Billy Collins is a book of poems. I am currently in the process of re-reading it more slowly to be sure I'm giving it a fair shake. The speaker of the poems, who seems to be pretty much the same guy from one poem to the next, leads a charmed life with busy birdfeeders just outside the window, a Paris apartment "someone gave [him]" and fresh salad for dinner every night, with the result that I start to find his celebration of the mundane a little monotonous. Why this should be, I'm not sure - I've got no quarrel with material comfort or salads and I definitely don't think poets, or poems, should have to sell all their possessions and live in a shipping crate for the sake of authenticity. I think I just reached my personal limit on genial tours of the speaker's well-lit writing space. There is also plenty of very gentle humor (and one or two attempts at less-gentle humor that didn't land for me at all) and some good lines, though I feel like they tend to get buried in the accumulation of cozy details. I can see the appeal of these poems' good-natured meandering, and I can even experience it from time to time, but I still felt a little disappointed sometimes when I turned the page and the poem was still going on.

Here's one poem that gave me that impatient feeling, but which I still liked well enough, despite my inability to figure out what a "jazz cap" is in this context:

( Aimless Love )

Most of the poems are a lot like this one, except that sometimes the guy in the poem reads a book or looks at a picture and tells you about it, and sometimes he takes a trip to Europe.


What I'm Reading Now

I've had The Book of Andre Norton sitting around for years and it finally came up in the queue - a small collection of short stories and essays by the incredibly prolific SFF writer Andre Norton. It's pretty good boilerplate that runs heavily to unearned last-minute romances. One of the stories, "All Cats Are Gray," was in my middle-school reader, about a thousand years ago. I hadn't understood a word of it back then, and I'd forgotten all about it until I read the opening line ("Steena of the Spaceways -- that sounds just like a corny title for one of the Stellar-Vedo sperads. I ought to know, I've tried my hand at writing enough of them. Only this Steena was no glamorous babe.") and a strange lost feeling flooded over me. I remembered being given a quiz on the events of the story and not being able to answer a single question. So this time, even though no one was quizzing me, I read it extra slowly and made sure I understood every paragraph.

Anyway, The Book of Andre Norton is one of a series of introductory anthologies Daw Books SF did of their writers back in the seventies; there's a Book of Poul Anderson, a Book of Frank Herbert, and a bunch of others. There's a huge bibliography in the back, and the previous owner of the book has marked some titles with red dots, some with black. So far I like Andre Norton, who writes lively, unpretentious stories and always seems to be having a good time.

( A couple more books )

Technically, I've also started A Theory of Literary Production, but I have to keep starting over because I'll get about fifteen pages in and realize I have no idea what Pierre Macherey just said. This has been the case with me and Theory of every kind from time immemorial. Will this time be different? I'll try, but I can't promise anything.

What I Plan to Read Next

The Little Paris Bookshop! Also Ancillary Justice, whenever it arrives (for the sci-fi book club), and whatever's next on my to-read shelf when I finally finish one of my slow reads, which honestly could be three weeks from now or more.

Crossposted from Livejournal

What I've Finished Reading

Mockingjay! When I first started reading The Hunger Games I got some warnings that the second two books weren't as good as the first, and that's probably objectively true, but I'm so glad that I read them that I barely even noticed. I didn't really believe in the rebellion as it was happening, which undermined things a little, but not as much as you might expect. This has never been a series where seamless plotting and economic feasibility were the point. I've spent a lot of time over the past couple of weeks making fun of/trying to make sense of the worldbuilding, but I've also been consistently impressed by Collins' achievement here: these books were totally addictive, totally memorable, smart and humane.

I know I just said "memorable," but actually, a few days after finishing the book, the details of the plot have already blurred together into a haze of impressions. I'm not sure that's actually a contradiction: the events are mostly just carriers for the imagery, the emotional beats and Collins' meticulous and unsentimental depictions of trauma.

( Some things that happen in Mockingjay )

Technically there's still kind of a half-hearted love triangle knocking around the edges, but it hardly ever comes up and there's never any real uncertainty about Katniss ditching her childhood buddy Stormy McVengeance in favor of Literal Breadname the steady and nurturing rock biscuit (with extra cinnamon). I don't think it was really necessary to have Gale hanging around representing The Fighter in this dilemma of how to live in response to oppression, because Katniss is already The Fighter and knows perfectly well from experience how exhausting it gets after the first ten minutes.

The epilogue makes the series, in my opinion.

( The questions are just beginning. )

I finished I Capture the Castle in no time, not because it's a fast-paced book (it's leisurely even when the emotional drama is at its peak) but because I liked the narrator so much and wanted to spend as much time with her and her family as possible. The joke was on me, because I got to the end of the book and then it was over.

I veered between hating the romance plot(s) and being indifferently tolerant toward them. Mostly I just wanted to buy Cassandra a chocolate with some brandy in it and maybe take her to a party where she can meet more than two people. Simon and Neil are the only really uninteresting characters in a gallery of wonderfully even-handed, funny and tolerant portraits - though I don't know if I would have found them as uninteresting if they hadn't been so pointedly the only love interest game in town. I did very much appreciate that [SPOILER] we did not go with a Childhood Sweethearts Forever ending - I was glad for that even though I liked Stephen about a billion times better than the Bros. Netherfield. Anyway, the romance plot was saved by its inconclusiveness: we don't know by the end if she's going to marry anyone, but we do know that she's writing a lot and getting better at it, or at least getting accustomed to the difficulty of making sentences out of feelings, and that's exactly as it should be.

I wished there were a little more about her dad and Topaz, because I loved them (Cassandra's dad is a nicely unsentimentalized Troubled Writer who doesn't write anything; Topaz is just the best) but they were treated at a level of detail that was realistic for Cassandra, so I won't complain.

( Marmion )

What I'm Reading Now

I started True Pretenses by Rose Lerner, but I'm thinking I might not finish it. These guys are appealing character outlines, but they had a whole chapter of dialogue to convince me they were characters and nothing came of it. And what's the point of an allegedly historical novel with no atmosphere, if the language isn't interesting? I'm going to assume I'm just being grumpy because I'm tired and give it another 50 pages to turn itself around.

Sargasso of Space by Andre Norton is a wonderfully unassuming Space TV Adventure (minus the TV). Dane's asshole friends make fun of him when he gets assigned to the lowest class of space trading ship, but he's determined to make the best of it, and the crew of the Solar Queen are friendlier and more interesting than those jerks, anyway. Almost as soon as they're underway, they gamble their salaries on a risky venture: buying sight-unseen trading rights to a Class D planet, which could have intelligent life but could just as easily be a bunch of fish in a bucket or nothing at all. What will they find? Probably something interesting, or there wouldn't be a book here - right? Clunky but earnest Circa 1955 racial diversity and lots of breezy worldbuilding.

What I Plan to Read Next

The Heiress Effect by Courtney Milan, maybe Cotillion. Probably other things.

I need to make an adjustment to my Mount TBR Challenge: I'm going to count books as read if I make an attempt but have to give up after 100 pages. Otherwise I may end up spending a lot of time reading books I don't care about, and I'd rather avoid that for now. No books in this DNF category yet, but I'm sure I'll need it eventually. My Mount TBR count is now 11 books, 1/6 of my total goal, which means I'm about where I should be.

Picnic at Hanging Rock is coming up, one of these days, for the "two books from Australia" portion of my reading challenge. What else is a book from Australia? Has anyone read Carpentaria?