evelyn_b

What I’ve Finished Reading

I didn’t have enormously high hopes when I bought Bobs: A Girl Detective at a used bookstore back in the day, but it still managed to disappoint them a little, as Bobs does hardly any detecting. It also exceeded them – this was a silly story, but it’s also lively and earnest and moves reasonably well under its own power, which you can't always say for the non-classic girls' books of yore. I enjoyed it much better than Nancy Drew, for example, in spite of Nancy's more focused and rigorous detective content. ( Cut for Bobs )

I enjoyed Transcendent Kingdom a lot. The story is sad – Gifty, the young neuroscientist narrator, is so busy taking care of her mentally ill mother and trying to make sense of her older brother’s death by opioid overdose that she hardly has time to be mad at her dad for walking out on them – but the writing is light-footed rather than heavy. The observations, from a narrator who isn’t sure what she believes anymore, of churchy Alabama pettiness are especially good. I wished some of the characters had a little more heft to them, especially Gifty’s academic friends and partners who mostly seem to exist as foils to and pinball-flippers for her inner struggles. To be fair, this is a first-person book and Gifty has a lot on her mind, and sometimes other people just bounce off the invisible cyclone through no fault of their own.

The real problem with (my copy of) this book is not Yaa Gyasi’s fault at all: whoever made it, in addition to the slightly-too-thick pages and their ostentatiously purposeful raggedyness (some pages were almost half an inch narrower than the page next to them), sewed it up way too tight, so that it was impossible to open all the way. Was this also on purpose, or was it a bad batch at the factory? I’d have to go into a bookstore to check. Whatever the reason, it was distracting to read a book that was constantly daring me to crack the spine.

World's Least Mechanically Gifted People Attach One Thing to Another

As noted last week, I bought the least DIY version of the Little Free Library kit available: a whole pre-assembled cupboard with working door, a post to affix it to, and a ground screw to jam the post securely into the ground. It was still a little too much spatial reasoning for the likes of me. ( Cut for hardware )

Anyway, it all came out all right in the end. The library is up and running, and one of the books has already been taken! There was going to be a picture here, but my work laptop collapsed on Friday and this backup machine has many flaws, so pictures will have to wait.

What I’m Reading Now

A ton of magazines and whatnot that got piled up and now I’m trying to put down. Some boring, some good, some a mix. At some point last year I caved to the pressure of low prices and bought a subscription to Smithsonian Magazine, and when it finally arrived they send me three issues at once. Smithsonian has some extremely specific ad targeting (flip phones that double as emergency alert systems and also have Facebook prominently pre-installed, BUY GOLD, commemorative model kits) and is a pretty good, very fast, very easy read: lots of brief stories on Things You Might Not Know About History, lots of attractive pictures of objects held by the Smithsonian. I'm not quite well-versed enough in Tumblr to know if it would be accurate to call it Granddad Tumblr.

The most recent issue of The Southern Review has a short story about Laika, one of the dogs shot into space by the Soviet space program (“You Would Set Your Jaws Upon My Throat” by Steve Trumpeter) and I honestly couldn’t tell you if it was good or not; it was about a good dog in a world that can't be trusted so I just cried the whole time.

What I Plan to Read Next

The question now is: is Wolf Hall going to jump the queue by virtue of being a Christmas gift, or is it going to wait its turn like everyone else? If it does wait its turn, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist and Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte are next up. If it doesn’t, then I guess it’s Cromwell Time.

I forgot to vote for the next book in my sci-fi book club, then woke up a week later to find we'll be reading the sequel to The Three-Body Problem, a sequel I have no interest in whatsoever. A valuable lesson in book club civic duty.

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What I've Finished Reading

Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett:

Granny had never had much time for words. They were insubstantial. Now she wished that she had found the time. Words were indeed insubstantial. They were as soft as water, but they were also as powerful as water and now they were rushing over the audience, eroding the levees of veracity, and carrying away the past.

That's us down there, she thought. Everyone knows who we really are, but the things down there are what they'll remember - three gibbering old baggages in pointy hats. All we've ever done, all we've ever been, won't exist anymore.

So Terry Pratchett just keeps getting better. Wyrd Sisters is a hilarious and affectionate parody of all things Shakespeare and a pointed meditation on the Ethics of Tudor Propaganda (and magic, and fiction as a species of magic), interrupted at intervals by Nanny Ogg singing an off-color song about the superior natural defenses of the hedgehog. It also might be Pratchett's most successfully character-driven comedy yet? I don't know; that's hard to judge. But the interplay among the three witches, and their genuine friction and friendship with each other, is a potentially inexhaustible well of enjoyment. I wish Wyrd Sisters were a sitcom, or a podcast, so that I could listen to three episodes a day for the rest of my life. Personally, I could have done with fewer jokes about how flat-chested Magrat is, but there's enough here to more than make up for it. There is also a memorable cameo by DEATH, as himself, suffering a rare bout of stage fright. It's always a pleasure to see you again, Death, even under circumstances as meta as these <3. Pratchett has all the chops he needs to pull of the Shakespeare parody: critical, lyrical, and bawdy. This is one of those books that make me fleetingly angry with myself for not reading them twenty years ago, just because I can see what a good friend they would have been to me during that time. But you know how time is. I read it now instead, and that has to be good enough.

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi ( is an ambitious novel )

The Old Man and the Sea ( is exactly what it says on the tin. )

What I'm Reading Now

The True Actor by Jacinto Lucas Pires. Out-of-work actor Americo Abril receives an offer to star in a self-referential art film, and almost as soon as he accepts, a self-referential art film swells up around him and swallows his real (?) life. I spent the first four chapters prickling with impatience at Americo Abril's dull detachment from everyone and everything (and his adultery and low-level alienation from his wife, always a hard sell to start with) but the stranger things get for Americo, the more willing I am to keep reading. I still wish I could like him a little more, though it's not the kind of book where liking the guy is the point. There's probably a little bit of translation syndrome at work here; you get the impression that a lot of these sentences were funnier or livelier in Portuguese.

I'm not supposed to like Henry Mulhaney in The Groves of Academe, either, but somehow it matters in The True Actor and doesn't matter in the least, or is an active good, in Groves. Mulhaney is a beautifully unattractive literature professor who turns a perfectly ordinary non-renewal of his contract into a moral crusade with just a few simple lies. That the brisk ink caricature of a tiny "progressive" college is so instantly familiar to me is all the funnier given that this book came out in 1952 and I didn't start college until the 1990s. An existential question emerges: Is it even possible to write a novel about academia without resorting to caricature? Is academia just a natural caricaturizing process? Anyway, things are off to a promising start here.

What I Plan to Read Next

Witches Abroad or Night Watch -- which one should it be, Pratchett fans? Next up in 99 Novels is Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor. Next on my own shelves: well, that depends on which shelf we're on.