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What I've Finished Reading

I've lost a lot of spare time lately, hence the late and rushed posting. However, I finally got around to reading We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates:

I don't ever want to lose sight of how short my time is here. And I don't ever want to forget that resistance must be its own reward, since resistance, at least within the life span of the resistors, almost always fails. I don't ever want to forget, even with whatever personal victories I achieve, even in the victories we achieve as a people of a nation, that the larger story of America and the world probably does not end well. Our story is a tragedy. I know it sounds odd, but that belief does not depress me. It focuses me. After all, I am an atheist and thus do not believe anything, even a strongly held belief, is destiny.


What I've Been Reading

Murder in the Mews - four novellas by Agatha Christie. The first begins with a suspicious suicide on Guy Fawkes Night, the second is about a mysterious burglary, allegedly of national importance, and the third, which I've just started, has a surprise appearance by Mr. Satterthwaite, whom I'm always happy to see.

Sign of the Unicorn is the third Amber novel by Roger Zelazny, and it's pretty good so far. I'll let you know more one of these days.

I'm not as far along in The Three Musketeers as I ought to be - I just finished Chapter 36. Constance is still missing. D'Artagnan has been doing some very tiresome intriguing against the beautiful English spy and I wish he would get over it and do something else. Athos, whom I still haven't totally forgiven for the throwaway line in which he thrashed his valet, has related a "tragic" story about a "friend" that made me like him even less, and revealed that he has a tragic and important secret identity that must never be revealed, like Albert Campion only tragic and important. Athos to me is only meta-amusing due to all his tragic self-importance and jaw-setting, and to D'Artagnan's youthful conviction that he is the bee's knees, but Porthos and Aramis are still delightful assholes in real time. I'm still hoping for the triumphant reappearance (in dramatic costume change) of George "Legs" Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, the Alcibiades of the North.

Dumas reminds us that it was A Different Time:

This note was in the first place a forgery; it was likewise an indelicacy. It was even, according to our present manners, something like an infamous action; but at that period people did not manage affairs as they do to-day.

All right, Dumas! I like these asides: If you want a swashbuckling romance from the age of the cavalier, you are going to have to put up with a certain amount of douchebaggery, so deal with it, readers!


What I Plan to Read Next

I'm not sure! I've got a lot of books lined up, but I'm not sure when I'm going to get to them.
evelyn_b: (Default)
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.
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What I've Finished Reading

The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless by Eliza Haywood, a Novel of the Double Standard from 1751. Betsy is a rich young teenager with "a giddy disposition" who doesn't want much out of life, just to flirt, joke around, visit local monuments without being mistaken for a prostitute, go to the theater with her friends ditto, and not be forced into an uncongenial marriage with a callous fortune-hunter in a last-ditch attempt to prevent irreparable damage to her reputation. Guess what she doesn't get?

If your standard for "old books" is 19th century English lit, the level of sexual frankness here might be surprising. It was surprising to me, even though I know not to treat The Past as a monolith, that when a character discusses getting pregnant and seeking an abortion, she uses the words "pregnancy" and "abortion." The characters here are also much more frank and open about being puppets than I'm used to, with their indicative stage names. Miss Betsy Thoughtless' guardians are Mr. Goodman and Lady Trusty, the con artist who tries to trick her into a fake marriage calls himself Sir Frederick Fineer (looks like "fine" but sounds like "veneer"), the suitor she loses through the malicious gossip of others is Mr Trueworth. In this book set in an obsessively gossipy and image-conscious London, "the public" is the most important and ubiquitous character, and a few well-placed anonymous letters can spoil a reputation overnight. A queasy confluence of comedy and nightmare, with happy ending engineered at the last minute and only after it's been thoroughly demonstrated that while the appearance of innocence may be prized, actual innocence is worse than useless.

I keep meaning to "catch up" on the books I've read, so let's see how many we can get through in turbo mode:

Books in Brief )

Oh, and The Anti-Death League got good eventually! Or else I got used to confusion and it dissipated. Maybe I'll have more to say about it next week.

What I'm Reading Now

I'm picking my way through The Guns of Avalon, which is sometimes delightful and sometimes boring, averaging out to not bad. Zelazzle takes a break from the clipped detective narration to indulge in some real horses-and-thunder fantasy prose from time to time, to reasonably good effect. It's still really hard to care about all the "throne of Amber must be mine" business, but we've met some promising new characters and had some conversations. This time I'm fully expecting a cliffhanger, so won't be nearly as annoyed when the cliff shows up.

What I Plan to Read Next

I really need to start entering the library through the door that doesn't have the free books shelf, because the free books shelf is going to be my downfall. I couldn't resist picking up DECIDER by flist favorite DICK FRANCIS, and will be making it my designated airplane book when I visit family this weekend.
evelyn_b: (ishmael)
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.
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What I've Finished Reading

It was supposed to be other things, but I got sidelined by C. S. Lewis' Space Trilogy. Do you like science fiction, but wish it had more Renaissance cosmology and random sermons about gender? The Space Trilogy isn't really science fiction so much as a very Lewisian fantasy set in space, or, in the case of That Hideous Strength, in which space is mentioned briefly toward the end. Some of the things that happen in the Space Trilogy: a mild-mannered philologist is kidnapped by uncouth public-school scientists who try to sacrifice him to some Martians, but the Martians turn out to be a harmless crew who teach him their language and take him fishing. Later, he meets some angels. The angels send him to Venus, where he has to prevent the local Adam-and-Eve equivalents from screwing it all up again. At first he tries logic and reason, but eventually has to resort to punching the Devil to death. Meanwhile, back on earth, a bunch of diabolical progressives are ruining a sleepy college town! Only one man can stop them, and that man is the resurrected Merlin (who just happens to have been buried in the college deer park).

If you like Lewis, or if you grew up with Lewis and aren't sure how you feel about him now, you should definitely give this a read. I sometimes go back and forth about how much I like Lewis, but these books made me very fond of him, as much because of as in spite of their flaws.

What I'm Reading Now

After I finished Doorways in the Sand, I burned straight through Trumps of Doom, another book by Roger "Razzle Zelazzle" Zelazny, and began but got bogged down in Nine Princes in Amber. Trumps is steeped in the same wisecracking/hard-boiled perpetual confusion as Doorways, whereas in Nine Princes most of the confusion evaporates early on and the story settles into a kind of opaque fantasy battle plot, which I'm having trouble getting into. The two books are linked: Merle, the narrator of Trumps of Doom is the son of Corwin, the narrator of Nine Princes, and both are exiled princes of the perpetually civil-warring fantasy kingdom Amber. Amber is the real world, and Earth and all the other realms are just shadows and mirrors of Amber, which is why Amber initially appears to be made up entirely of fantasy cliches. It's a great premise, but I think like it better as a background curse on hapless concussed pseudo-detectives than I like it as a setting in its own right.

What I Plan to Read Next

Still catching up!
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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.
evelyn_b: (ishmael)
What I’ve Finished Reading

No one’s happy by the end of Room at the Top. Joe starts an affair with a likable older woman named Alice, whom he feels comfortable talking to as a friend and whose teeth he doesn’t see as a rebuke to his own teeth. This is by contrast to the teeth of Susan, the rich girl, which are white, even, prosperous, and mocking. Joe plots to lure Susan away from her rich boyfriend and get her to marry him, which will be a stick in the eye of the British class system, which would be all very well except he doesn’t particularly enjoy her company and now he’s stuck with it. Not to mention the “necessity” of throwing over Alice, with attendant grisly tragedy and guilt.

Burgess thinks the message here is “stick with your own kind,” but maybe it’s more that everybody loses when guys treat women as class markers instead of as people? It’s hard for me to tell exactly. Joe is not a lovable character but he is a good narrator: bitter, observant, totally unsentimental, almost heroically unembarrassed.

What I’m Reading Now

Doorways in the Sand by Roger Zelazny. The narrator, Fred Cassidy, has been changing his major for thirteen years because his uncle’s will provides for him as long as he is a student, but once he receives his degree the remaining money will go to the Irish Republican Army. He also likes to climb things, so we meet him on the roof of one of the campus buildings. Thirteen years of higher learning has given Fred a healthy respect for the absurd, which may or may not serve him well once he accidentally gets mixed up in the theft of an alien artifact.

This is a weird book about weird things happening, but the snarky matter-of-fact narration makes it work in a way total seriousness wouldn’t. It’s not exactly a comedy, but sometimes it feels like a plot outlined according to the Rule of Funny, then played straight with a narrator who nevertheless sees the humor in any given situation. Fred gets attacked a lot, winds up unconscious in the Australian outback and is rescued by alien agents dressed up as local fauna. Someone is convinced he’s stolen this valuable stone, and Fred is equally convinced that he has no idea where it is. As if that’s not enough, his new advisor is threatening to graduate him come hell or high water, and the artifact business is so distracting he might actually pull it off. What then?

At one of my local coffeehouses, I found a book called The Book of Jane, a Christian chick-lit novel. It’s not stealth Christian like Can't Help Falling, where the Inspiring Message didn't rear its head until two-thirds of the way through, but it is a “witty, modern” retelling of the Book of Job. Is this wise? Is it possible? Is it to be desired? I guess we’ll find out. Jane is a PR agent living in New York, with a cute boyfriend and a non-explicitly gay best friend and an exciting new client and an unshakable faith in God. But would she be so keen on God if her life weren’t perfect??

What I Might Read Next

I went out of town and bought too many books. These will be discussed soon.

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