evelyn_b

What I've Finished Reading

I didn't have any trouble finishing Decider by Dick Francis, but it left kind of a weird taste in my mouth. The narrator, a regular guy obsessed with restoring ruined houses, happens to inherit some shares in a racecourse owned by his extremely dysfunctional not-really-family (the family of the guy his mother divorced before he was born). The racecourse managers come to him for help in dealing with the family, and he gets entangled in a lot of skulduggery, including having part of the stands blown up on top of him. It's entertaining? Francis is very readable. I didn't love the grim gleefulness with which the family's most loathsome member is disposed of, or the last-minute revelations that actually he was even worse than you thought! I wasn't thrilled with our up-close-and-grody tour of the narrator's personal life, either. I guess it hit a level of "complicated and unsympathetic" that I'm willing to ride with in a "literary" book but don't like or want in a pulpy thriller about vicious racecourse owners trying to out-sabotage each other. So the jury's still out on Dick Francis; I'll probably give him another try the next time he shows up in a free-books context, or on the cheap shelf at one of my regional bookstores.

What I'm Reading Now

Still The Guns of Avalon, weirdly enough - it's such a short book! but I'm finding it slow going even though I don't dislike it particularly. Probably I've just been distracted; it's been a busy week made busier by anxiety and technological glitches.

Also began Making Money by Terry Pratchett, a gift from a friend! This was a slower start than other Pratchett books, and feels sometimes, especially in the beginning, a little more contrived - but maybe that's just Moist von Lipwig's particular curse. Moist is a man in a Dostoevskian pickle: rescued from the gallows at the last minute by Machiavellian city boss Lord Vetinari, he's now obligated to use his new respectable persona to Vetinari's advantage or go right back to being hanged. First he reformed the post office (presumably in a previous book); now he's tasked with beefing up the banking system so Vetinari can do a bunch of expensive infrastructure work. The book picks up a lot once he inherits a small dog (Mr Fusspot) who has inherited the position of bank chairman. I like it when animals have positions of power they don't actually care about. It picks up a little more after he invents paper money, and that's about where I am.

What I Plan to Read Next

Maybe next week I'll catch up for real! Maybe. Also possibly The Three Musketeers.

What I've Finished Reading

I was disappointed that Reality Matters wasn't better.

( Maybe better is the wrong word. )

So Reality Matters didn't give me what I wanted, but it did give me a funny story about a guy who superglued his tracksuit to a boat in order to prevent himself from falling into the Thames on TV. Sometimes when life closes a door, it opens a window.

Also finished: Nine Princes in Amber. It was ok. It picks up a little at the end - not coincidentally, when Corwin is blinded and thrown into prison, i.e., when he's returned to a state of confusion, disadvantage, and necessary cunning. Thoroughly self-confident dudes leading fantasy battle charges for the One High Throne of Whatever is significantly less my thing, it turns out. However! I've been informed that, as I might have expected based on my previous Zelazny experience, All Is Not What It Seems, so I'll be reading on.

What I'm Reading Now

The Anti-Death League by Kingsley Amis - a 99 Novels novel I've begun three times now without success. I'm not sure why I find it so hard to follow. Lucky Jim, also by Amis, was easy to read, energetic in its meanness, and downright addictive - I read it twice in a row just for the fun of it - so my almost total inability here to keep track of who is speaking and which one they are is disconcerting and discouraging. It can't just be my mood, because, like I said, I've tried it three times - but what is it? This time I've gotten further than before - about to Page 75 - but I still don't know who anyone is from one page to the next. The only exceptions are the two female characters (Designated Nympho and Not Actually A Lesbian) and the psychiatrist who thinks all heterosexuality is a symptom of repressed homosexuality, which is kind of funny in an abstract way. Maybe I need to start again from the beginning.

What I Plan to Read Next

The Guns of Avalon by Roger Zelazny, but I'm also still in catch-up mode. We Were Eight Years in Power just showed up on my doorstep, so maybe that, too.

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.