![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Every Day is Like Wednesday
Jul. 31st, 2019 04:54 pmWhat I've Finished Reading
I actually finished Ashlin and Olivia on the plane several weeks ago - better late than never? It's a "second-chance" love story between two young women who are so young that their "second chance" comes when they are college sophomores (the first chance was when they were all-consuming middle-school best friends for a year before having a painful falling out). ( cut for spoilers just in case you like your romances suspenseful )
The big draw here is the characters and their conversations - Aster Glenn Gray has a real gift for, and a willingness to indulge in, earnest, funny, meandering conversations between likeable characters. Ashlin and Olivia have passionate, youthful, totally believable opinions on art and movies, The Patriarchy and fanworks, and it's a pleasure to listen to them spitball and pontificate, both as highly invested thirteen-year-olds and as young adults in Europe. Gray is as unfettered as any actual thirteen-year-old by notions of What Kids Really Talk Like - her conversations always feel like they were based on conversations and not on other books, but not to the the point that you can't follow them.
What I'm Reading Now
Shakespeare's sonnets, all of them from the beginning. You probably knew that one of the major themes of the collection is "Golden youth, have some damn babies; your mom wants grandkids!" but did you know HOW MUCH?
( give it a rest mom i'm almost forty )
Eventually the message shifts, but there's A LOT of this in the beginning.
I warmed briefly to Giles Goat-Boy when the Goat-Boy sat down to an entire uni-verse parody of Oedipus Rex in heroic couplets, and later, even more briefly when the hypertext tape machine showed up, but mostly it's been the same old ironically racist American Hollywood Literature Archetypes cleverness slog and plenty of it. On the plus side, it's written so as to have a mild forward motion even as I think I'm completely out of patience with it, like a very slow amusement park boat ride.
The Image Men is a regular novel about some con men who start an Institute of Social Imagistics at a brand-new redbrick university, and it's much more fun, though it too is getting a little bogged down and repetitive. Pavane takes place in an alt-history 1968, where technology and social development has been arrested and warped by a powerful Catholic Church since the assassination of Elizabeth I in 1588. It's richly imagined even if it's not always totally convincing, and Keith Roberts is having a ton of fun describing the hard but high calling of the semaphore operators' guild. I wouldn't be shocked out of my mind if I found out Terry Pratchett had never read it, but I would be pretty surprised.
And I finally got back on the Kirstin Lavransdatter train: ( Cut for Kristin Lavransdatter ) It's a good book about how damned uncomfortable everything is all the time. Maybe being a 14th-century Norwegian makes it a little better, maybe a little worse - on the evidence of this book, it's hard to say.
What I Plan to Read Next
I still have a medium-sized stack of books left over from my trip, and one more 99 Novels book out from the library - Cocksure by Mordecai Richler - plus I keep "accidentally" picking up New Yorkers from the free shelf because I like the covers. Coming soon, if I get my act together: some scans? That's a big if.
I actually finished Ashlin and Olivia on the plane several weeks ago - better late than never? It's a "second-chance" love story between two young women who are so young that their "second chance" comes when they are college sophomores (the first chance was when they were all-consuming middle-school best friends for a year before having a painful falling out). ( cut for spoilers just in case you like your romances suspenseful )
The big draw here is the characters and their conversations - Aster Glenn Gray has a real gift for, and a willingness to indulge in, earnest, funny, meandering conversations between likeable characters. Ashlin and Olivia have passionate, youthful, totally believable opinions on art and movies, The Patriarchy and fanworks, and it's a pleasure to listen to them spitball and pontificate, both as highly invested thirteen-year-olds and as young adults in Europe. Gray is as unfettered as any actual thirteen-year-old by notions of What Kids Really Talk Like - her conversations always feel like they were based on conversations and not on other books, but not to the the point that you can't follow them.
What I'm Reading Now
Shakespeare's sonnets, all of them from the beginning. You probably knew that one of the major themes of the collection is "Golden youth, have some damn babies; your mom wants grandkids!" but did you know HOW MUCH?
( give it a rest mom i'm almost forty )
Eventually the message shifts, but there's A LOT of this in the beginning.
I warmed briefly to Giles Goat-Boy when the Goat-Boy sat down to an entire uni-verse parody of Oedipus Rex in heroic couplets, and later, even more briefly when the hypertext tape machine showed up, but mostly it's been the same old ironically racist American Hollywood Literature Archetypes cleverness slog and plenty of it. On the plus side, it's written so as to have a mild forward motion even as I think I'm completely out of patience with it, like a very slow amusement park boat ride.
The Image Men is a regular novel about some con men who start an Institute of Social Imagistics at a brand-new redbrick university, and it's much more fun, though it too is getting a little bogged down and repetitive. Pavane takes place in an alt-history 1968, where technology and social development has been arrested and warped by a powerful Catholic Church since the assassination of Elizabeth I in 1588. It's richly imagined even if it's not always totally convincing, and Keith Roberts is having a ton of fun describing the hard but high calling of the semaphore operators' guild. I wouldn't be shocked out of my mind if I found out Terry Pratchett had never read it, but I would be pretty surprised.
And I finally got back on the Kirstin Lavransdatter train: ( Cut for Kristin Lavransdatter ) It's a good book about how damned uncomfortable everything is all the time. Maybe being a 14th-century Norwegian makes it a little better, maybe a little worse - on the evidence of this book, it's hard to say.
What I Plan to Read Next
I still have a medium-sized stack of books left over from my trip, and one more 99 Novels book out from the library - Cocksure by Mordecai Richler - plus I keep "accidentally" picking up New Yorkers from the free shelf because I like the covers. Coming soon, if I get my act together: some scans? That's a big if.
