evelyn_b

What I've Finished Reading

My Absolute Darling was recommended to me by an acquaintance, who said (correctly) that the close-third POV was excellent, but neglected to mention anything about the multiple extremely vivid incestuous rape scenes. I mention them here in case, like me, you would prefer not to be surprised. It's a big, slow, suspenseful novel about a survivalist's daughter who discovers she can survive on her own terms. I don't think I would have read it if I'd known about the incestuous rape element - not because I don't think stories like that should be told, simply because I have a hard time getting them out of my head if they're well-written and if they aren't it just makes me angry - and I don't know now what I think about the ending - but once I hit the half-way mark I wasn't able to put it down for more than a few minutes at a time until it was finished. I keep wanting to say the final confrontation is too much, but I don't know if it really is. I think it's partly that I mistrust cathartic shootouts, and partly that I still have this misguided desire for fiction to be smaller and more mundane and manageable than real life.

ETA I'm sure I'm being unfairly dismissive above - for one thing, "cathartic shootout" probably isn't to the point, for another, who cares what I don't want to read about? I want to note that in addition to the strong unsentimental POV voice, there are two "normal" teenage characters whom I found completely and unexpectedly fresh and believable, not least because author Gabriel Tallent isn't tied down by misguided ideas about what "real" teenagers might realistically be expected to care about and instead just dumps (what could easily be) a big pile of his own earnest teenage interests and injoke erudition on the page. There are other good things to say about it, but the Chatty Weed Nerd Teens were what got me past my initial misgivings and into the part of the book where I couldn't put it down.

What I'm Reading Now

Anyway, you know who isn't the least bit mundane or manageable? All these assholes in The Three Musketeers! D'Artagnan falls in love with his landlord's wife and immediately gets mixed up in COURT POLITICS which leads directly to DANGEROUS COVERT MISSIONS TO ENGLAND to save the HONOR OF THE QUEEN. This is more than fine by D'Artagnan, who has wanted to be in exactly this kind of story since he was four years old.

( Go Go Musketeers! )

My favorite Musketeer is probably still Aramis, the pudgy, vain, and affable theology student, but unfortunately he doesn't seem to get quite as much page time as the others. Maybe I just feel like he doesn't get his due because I like him best. D'Artagnan continues to be an overeager adolescent golden retriever who also kills people. Will his reward for SAVING THE KINGDOM with his breakneck Channel-crossing valor be the love of the beautiful Madame Bonacieux? Apparently not, because she's just been kidnapped! Again!! Poor D'Artagnan. Serialization is hard on a young man.

What I Plan to Read Next

I've managed to hit my Mount TBR goal of 60, and will probably try for 75 if I don't get distracted. There's some Zelazny to read - the next book in the Amber series, which will determine whether or not I go on to read the rest of the Amber series - and some books from my TBR shelves; I'm not sure yet which ones.

What I've Finished Reading

I enjoyed Doorways in the Sand all the way through. Fred receives mysterious instructions from a mysterious entity, gets himself reversed in an alien contraption (which saves his life, but causes everything to appear backwards including important written instructions) and is awarded a doctorate against his will. Eventually the mystery of what happened to the stone, which is also the mystery of what happened to Fred, is solved. Fred settles into his new life of slightly more responsibility, as the people of earth adjust to their new status as members of a galactic community. The message, I guess, is that everyone has to grow up sometime.

I didn’t expect The Book of Jane to get dark, or for Jane to get told off by the whirlwind, but I wasn't expecting it to pull quite as many punches as it does. Jane's dog gets sick, but then it gets better. Her boyfriend breaks up with her because she keeps willfully interpreting attempts to break up with her as proposals, and I can't really say I blame him. The roof of her Manhattan apartment caves in and she has to find a hotel for a few days, which is rough because she just lost her job due to a hilarious tabloid misunderstanding. Her non-explicitly gay best friend’s mother dies, but all of Jane’s immediate family are fine. She gets a rash on her face, but it's easily treatable and has no serious social consequences. Well, we do live in an age of medical marvels! There’s nothing wrong with lightening things up! And despite name-checking the Book of Job on the back cover, The Book of Jane never really purports to be anything but a sprightly comedy of temporary loss.

I’d like this book a lot more if the love interest were a little less repellent, or even if he were something else in addition to being repellent. He’s an asshole actuary (and convert to Christianity, though that doesn’t really come up except as an aside) whose first move is to confront Jane with a bunch of negging about her marriage prospects. When he was first introduced, I thought he was going to be the Satan of the story, which I think was a deliberate feint on the part of the author. They start dating after Jane's breakup and he needles her all the time about being too non-spontaneous, pushes her to burn her day planner, takes her on a surprise helicopter ride, and buys her a Blackberry because now “she’s ready to handle it.” Then he makes fun of her for not noticing that he programmed the date of their wedding into the Blackberry. Then: ostentatious public proposal on New Year’s Eve. The end! Dude doesn’t even apologize for the initial negging campaign, which he seems to think was totally justified because 1) he was so in love he couldn’t think straight! and 2) it worked, didn’t it? >:|

What I’m Reading Now

Back when the local used bookstore closed, I took home a lot of things. Probably the most ill-advised rescue of all was Library of the World’s Best Literature, a 27-volume set for the well-heeled autodidact, circa 1902. It’s in good condition and I was curious about what was included and what the editors had to say about it – that’s not a great excuse, but it’s the only one I have. At present, I don’t have room for it on my bookshelves, so it’s stacked up in two piles on the edge of a desk. I’ve decided to play Early Twentieth Century Autodidact and read a short section every day, starting with whichever volume happened to be on top, which was II: Aqui-Bag. Hence: Thomas Aquinas and the Arabian Nights. The Aquinas selections are pretty perfunctory, but there’s a long introduction to the Nights and more than one tale, including a portion of Sindbad the Sailor. We’ll see how this goes.

Jules Verne's Paris in the Twentieth Century, written in 1860 about a forlorn young Romantic poet of 1960, tells a tale as old as time: no one wants to read poetry any more, and the forlorn Y. R., a spirit too delicate to work in a bank, is forced onto the streets - primarily by his own stubbornness, but oh well. I'm not a huge fan of No One Reads Anymore screeds, having attracted far too many when I worked at a used bookstore (usually while I was trying to read), but I have to give Verne credit for setting up the underlying causes much more convincingly than Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451. Verne depicts an enormous centralized educational system tied directly to business and industry from which the French language and literature components have withered and dropped from undernourishment, so that anyone who wants to learn about Balzac or any of those guys has to do it on their own. Bookstore owners try to sell you the best-selling engineering manuals instead, librarians make faces at you or stare in confusion.

Like Trent's Last Case, this book has a Love Interest who goes around Pigpen-like in a perpetual cloud of microsermons about True Womanhood. The funny thing is that in these two books written fifty years apart, the complaints about Modern Girls are almost exactly the same.

What I Might Read Next

Any one of several random TBR selections. I’ve got a study on “swap clubs” from the 1970s and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Greek myth retellings for children, among other things. And a long list of 99 Novels.

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What I've Finished Reading

The Laughing Monsters. I like Denis Johnson, though his work was never the beacon for me that it was for a lot of people I know, so I read this book partly out of a sense of obligation despite some clear indications that it was going to be Not My Thing. Maybe that was a mistake.

( It was short, anyway, and did me no harm. )

It's also entirely possible that the extra-large print had a subconscious effect on my impressions – like maybe some part of my brain kept trying to read it as a YA novel and was constantly being surprised by all the rape and arms dealing and whatnot.

What I'm Reading Now

Prometheus: The Life of Balzac by André Maurois. It's a biography of an author I've never read, written in 1964 in a style that feels a little old-fashioned -- peppered with self-conscious epigrams about genius, women, and the relationship of women to genius -- but very readable and almost as exuberantly confident and charming as its subject. The elder Balzacs are supportive of 19-year-old Honoré, even if secretly they are skeptical about the idea of literature as a money-making venture. They have just set him up in romantic fake poverty in Paris for a trial run of two years, to "prove his talent." His first move as a Real Writer in Paris: attempt to develop a philosophy of life!! His second move: write a spectacularly earnest epic verse play about Cromwell and send it to a well-known dramatist! (Honoré's mother celebrates the occasion by making a beautiful copy of Cromwell in her own handwriting).

"He read it with care, but when Madame Balzac and Laure called on him to ask his opinion he suggested that the author's time might be better employed than in the writing of stage pieces. He added that he did not wish to discourage a young man and was quite ready to suggest to him 'how he should approach the study of belles-lettres'. The sheet of paper on which he had noted his private opinion of the play was lying on his desk. Laure got hold of it and passed it on to Honoré. It was a good deal more blunt: 'The author would be well-advised to try anything except literature. . ."

Honoré bounces right back, though. <3

I'm almost done with Under the Volcano and maybe next week I'll have something to say about it. It's virtuosic as hell.

What I Plan to Read Next

It's your turn, The Victim by Saul Bellow!

Also, DID YOU KNOW I am still reading Finnegans Wake; maybe eventually I'll even finish it. Does anyone ever finish Finnegans Wake, or do they just hop off the boat before it starts to go around again? Anyway, I will get to the part where the pages run out (at this rate probably sometime in 2017).