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What I've Finished Reading

Like Clifford Chatterly's blameless motor-chair, Lady Chatterly's Lover did the best it could. My patience got tested by all the back-to-the-land business and the general swallowing-up of the last eighty pages in The Mellors Method of Manhood: A Free Course in Comprehensive Mellorology With Oliver Mellors, but I was glad I read it just the same. Mellors, who has to bear the symbolic burden of being a Real Man in a world of emasculated abstractions with skinny legs, seriously suffers from it as a character: he enters the book as living flesh only to dissolve by the end into a cloud of words. Connie is sympathetically drawn and less garrulous and all-knowing, and fares a little better overall. Mellors' wife Bertha never gets to be a character in the first place. In the end, though, I think my feelings were a little less mixed than [personal profile] osprey_archer's. I liked this book, for its cranky, awkward earnestness and for its beautifully observed portraits of brooding hens and spring plants (even if Lawrence's irritating habit of tacking the word "female" all over every descriptive noun spoils it a little) and for Connie, who is a good character until Mellors starts in talking and forgets she's still there. It's because Connie is so believably discontented that I don't buy the alleged happy ending for a minute. Is it even supposed to be a happy ending? I can't tell. But that's all right, I think. Any story can have a happy ending if you cut it off in time, and sometimes even if you skip ahead five years and reduce Connie's messy second divorce to a two-sentence summary and a wry, sad smile.

The Dispossessed was slower going than The Left Hand of Darkness - it's a little more nakedly a novel of ideas, with many, many long conversations about social organization among the post-revolutionary anarchist settlers of Anarres and between Anarresti physicist Shevek and his hosts on the archist, "propertarian" planet Urras - but I liked it once I got used to it. The sections set on Urras are full of fish-out-of water scenes: Shevek goes shopping, Shevek meets an otter, Shevek gets drunk for the first time, Shevek asks where all the women scientists are and gets a lot of confusing Space Sixties double-entendres in reply. Eventually a plot breaks out, but mostly it's a worldbuilding story (and a story about worldbuilding).

Oh! and I finished listening to Burnt Offerings by Laurell K. Hamilton. I couldn't really tell you what happened, except that Anita is Very Important to inter-were politics and there was a lot of non- and dubiously-consensual sex and maybe someone getting set on fire? But the narrator did a great job with Anita's brattiness and the douchey and/or goofily accented voices of her coworkers/harem, and it passed the time effectively while I was moving things around. I tried another audiobook, The Hand of Oberon by Roger Zelazny, with much less success; I couldn't follow it at all and gave up within about ten minutes.

What I'm Reading Now

I've just begun Scenes from Provincial Life and so far, it's just as low-key as its title suggests, except that the young narrator and his friends keep casually wondering if they should leave England for America ahead of the Nazis. In the meantime, the narrator has a job at a school where he gets criticized for not expressing more disapproval of the boys' bad language. He's seeing a woman named Myrtle, and wondering if there's a good way to bring her along on the escape-to-America plan without having to marry her. It's February 1939 and who knows what the world will look like in a year? Right now, it's a lot of tea shops and dismal news on the radio, and buttering different kinds of bread and trying to think clearly about a future to big and close to see, plus some beautifully petty and confusing awkwardness over whether Tom's boyfriend and the narrator's girlfriend are allowed to meet each other at their shared weekend sex cottage.

What I Plan to Read Next

Guards! Guards! is here at last! And I'll probably finish To Say Nothing of the Dog this week, also. The next book club selection is the Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov, which I've read before and probably won't start until I have to go out of town -- it's one of those bag-of-chips books that are good for reading on airplanes.
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What I've Finished Reading

Time of Hope by C. P. Snow. It went by fast and didn't bore me, and was a little more interesting than the previous Snow. This one is kind of diluted Somerset Maugham, with the narrator deliberately getting himself hopelessly entangled with an unhappy woman who will make him unhappy. I might say a little more about it next week and I might not. Probably I should.

What I'm Sort of Reading

In an attempt to give my eyes a break, I picked up a free audiobook from work and have been listening to it. The book is Burnt Offerings by Laurell K. Hamilton, starring a slightly insufferable urban vampire hunter, her preternaturally foppish vampire boyfriend, and lots of rape. It takes place in a world where there are were-versions of every mammal anyone ever drew on a notebook in middle school, vampires, a Circus of the Damned, and zombies, and probably some other things that just haven't come up. Anita Blake works as a kind of law-enforcement liaison for supernatural cases. This provides her with lots of interesting scars to show off in tank tops and backless dresses, and also some moral dilemmas. There are already enough descriptions of clothing and dialogue infodumps for ten regular books - Anita reminds me a little of Enoby Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way. She was dating a vampire and a werewolf, but the werewolf freaked her out by eating a guy right in front of her, so now she's sticking to the comparatively safe and meticulously groomed vampire, who talks with a Pepe Le Pew accent and says "ma petite" a lot.

It's not really my thing. If this were a paper book, I would have closed it around the third or fourth conversation about how tough and goff and unlike other girls Anita is, but in this format it's enjoyable. I don't mind that I can't follow the plot because I probably wouldn't like the plot very much (from what I can tell: a bunch of supernatural factions rape and torture each other; Anita is the Chosen One of several communities of which she is not a part), and it helps pass the time while I'm cleaning.

What I'm Reading Now

Lady Chatterly's Lover is a book that I am reading )

It's interesting. I can't really tell how good it is or isn't. The little motor chair is my favorite character, poor little guy. It could be the hero of a children's book: broken and abandoned by the evil/pathetic Sir Clifford, it lingers forlornly first in a barn, then in a scrap yard, before being discovered and fixed up by the scrap metal man as a gift for his daughter, who loves it for the freedom it gives her while respecting its limitations as a machine. It could be called Dream of the Chair or A Chair for Cecilia or The Very Lonely Chair or The Helping Chair, with winsome single-color imitation period illustrations, or maybe some nice watercolors.

I just started To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis, which does have a time-travel grant committee, or maybe just one eccentric billionaire who controls the time-travel funds; I'm not sure. There's a team of time-travelers who have been sent back to confirm the existence at a particular time of an architectural feature, for reasons that are unclear. It's a little funny, but not yet as funny as Three Men in a Boat. I am going to read the rest, but I have to finish The Dispossessed first, and a bunch of other things.

What I Plan to Read Next

I have to finish my current stack before I can start anything new! Two new 99 Novels, previously mentioned -- The Disenchanted and Scenes from Provincial Life. Some books from my bookshelf, probably.
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What I've Finished Reading

Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett. Death is fired for imprudently developing a personality, and his functions are put on hold until a suitable replacement can be found. This naturally leads to a lot of confusion and mess, but for a little while Death is able to enjoy his new job as a farm laborer and his new friends down at the pub. Children and wizards can see his true form, but it doesn't cause as much trouble as you might expect.

"Hallo, skelington."



"Hallo, skelington."


He swiveled around.

The small child of the house was watching him with the most penetrating gaze he had ever seen.

"You are a skelington, aren't you," she said. "I can tell because of the bones."

[. . .]

LOOK, he said, IF I WAS REALLY A SKELETON, LITTLE GIRL, I'M SURE THESE OLD GENTLEMEN HERE WOULD HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY ABOUT IT.

She regarded the old men at the other end of the bench.

"They're nearly skelingtons anyway," she said. "I shouldn't think they'd want to see another one."

He gave in.

I HAVE TO ADMIT THAT YOU ARE RIGHT ON THAT POINT.

"Why don't you fall to bits?"

I DON'T KNOW. I NEVER HAVE.

"I've seen skelingtons of birds and things and they all fall to bits."

PERHAPS IT IS BECAUSE THEY ARE WHAT SOMETHING WAS, WHEREAS THIS IS WHAT I AM.



"I can tell because of the bones." <3 I enjoyed this book almost as much as Mort. Every scene involving Death settling in to village life was pure gold, and the rest was a mix of good, great, not-so-great, and amazing, with a little confusion and some clunkiness scattered in for good measure. Will Death save the day? Do you even have to ask? I'm delighted with Terry Pratchett for making the Grim Reaper such an unexpectedly (and hilariously) sympathetic protagonist.

What I'm Reading Now

Time of Hope has the strongest start of any C. P. Snow book yet! Or maybe I just like stories about kids having to deal with their parents' problems. Lewis Eliot is the narrator we've had all along, with the same transparent style. The different threads are beginning to meet each other here: we've got George Passant, who was the central figure of Strangers and Brothers, and another reference to Roy's youthful infatuation with Jack and the scandal it causes when his parents find out.

I liked the scene when Lewis' father takes him to a cricket match, the first sports game they have gone to together, in order to break the news that he is about to file for bankruptcy. As Mr. Eliot watches the players, he begins to daydream about a new career:

I was not sure of the facts, but I knew that somehow the answer would please my father )

Lady Chatterly's Lover is chattering along. I'm a little bored with the endless references to "the bitch-goddess, Success" and her hapless hound-prostitute-acolytes. I get it! Success is a bitch-goddess! This imagery is theoretically pungent but strangely unspecific. The multiple significant glares of Mellors the Gamekeeper are also boring - in both senses, I guess. But I'm a sucker for earnest early twentieth-century cocktail-party sex talk, and LCL is almost nothing but. DID YOU KNOW that our civilization is about to fall into a bottomless chasm of malaise? Did you know that when that happens, the only bridge across the chasm will be the phallus? It's true! Or, maybe not true in a strict sense, but you have to admit it sounded pretty smart for a second there! Or if not smart, exactly, at least mildly titillating, and isn't that what this broken-backed eunuch of a country needs? No offence, Clifford :(.

Also, real men and real women are in alarmingly short supply in these rootless times! What makes men and women real? No one knows for sure, but it's clear what real men and women don't do: they don't lounge around in the Chatterlys' drawing room quipping about sex taxonomy over brandy like these jokers.

I thought Connie's experience with the needy playwright Michaelis and his humiliating criticism of her was very well drawn, and maybe a good metonomy for Connie's sense of betrayal and confusion in general - not just by sex, but by all the ideals of adulthood that seem to have dissolved at close range, like walking into a cloud. Connie has finally hired a nurse for Clifford and started taking long walks in her free time, which means that D. H. Lawrence has the chance to do some of that seasonal description he's good at.

What I Plan to Read Next

The further adventures of Death? And when I finish Time of Hope I'll be up to 1950 in my 99 Novels chronology, which means Scenes from Provincial Life by William Cooper and The Disenchanted by Budd Sculberg, two books I know nothing about!
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What I've Finished Reading

Not much! Uninteresting circumstances have made it hard for me to concentrate this week, so I didn't get far with any books that aren't super easy to read. I finished Mort, in which Death takes a human apprentice and tries to get a more relaxing job "maybe something nice with cats or flowers." The apprentice screws everything up due to excessive compassion and anyway, Death isn't allowed to take a break; it's as bad as being a fictional detective. I read Hot Water by P. G. Wodehouse, which was pleasantly full of American con artists trying to con one another.

I did finish The Body, which I liked a lot, though there was a caricature of myself at 19 at the back of my mind going, "Ugh, another book about male jealousy, ugh" and worrying that Bishop was going to kill his wife in the end. But my present self thought it was beautifully written, funny and suspenseful. It's like Leontes' monologue in The Winter's Tale, but suburban: two great tastes that turn out to go great together. And Bishop's jellyfish uxoriousness is appealing even as he's tearing himself to pieces for no reason - or possibly that's just me. Anyway, another hit from the 99 Novels list.

What I'm Reading Now

A bunch of things I keep closing after five pages, through no fault of their own.

I promised [personal profile] osprey_archer I would join her in reading Lady Chatterly's Lover, so I started that this morning. The last thing I read by D. H. Lawrence was in 2008 or so and I vaguely remembered his prose style being kind of overheated and fairy-taleish (possibly incorrectly) so I was surprised that the first two chapters of LCL are extremely straightforward and explanatory, almost like a Baby-Sitters' Club opening chapter, where everyone's traits are dealt out to us at the outset. Connie and Clifford married without knowing each other very well, then Clifford went to war and came back paralyzed from the waist down. Clifford wants to be a writer but is thwarted by his lack of an inner life, or something like that; Connie wants a sex life but is thwarted by Clifford's paralysis. Cultural osmosis (and the back cover) tells me that this book will be about Connie having an affair, or maybe several affairs, rather than about Clifford and Connie learning to work with Clifford's limitations. But we'll see!

What I Plan to Read Next

It's C. P. Snow time again! And I'll have to catch up with my other books sometime, hopefully soon.

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