I finished the last 150 pages of Fevre Dream in one fell swoop last night. What amazingly complex characters! Martin addressed one of the things that constantly bother me about vampire stories: The incredible self-loathing all vampires seem to have for themselves.
Even at the height of his misery, Joshua
didn’t want to destroy all the other night creatures. He didn’t blame Julian’s sadism on the fact that he was a vampire or killed humans… he blamed it on the fact that Julian was bat(heh)-shit crazy.
Starting up Moneyball finally. It’s been sitting on my shelf for along time despite tons of recommendations, so I finally decided to bite the bullet and read it.
Not me! I feel like I’ve ditched half the books I started this year. I’ve just abandoned Spent (probably good, but I couldn’t get into it), and The Picture of Dorian Gray (it was making me want to punch someone). I started another book, but I guess I’ll keep my mouth shut until I see if I’m really going to read the whole thing.
I’ve started Mary Roach’s Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife. I’m mainly reading it because I enjoyed her book Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers.
Finished The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle. While I appreciate his way with words, I felt a bit guilty for not appreciating the story more. It was sad and sweet and humorous in spots, but I expected to be blown away, and I wasn’t. Me = peasant, I guess.
I’m leaving for Seattle today, on the train, three nights/two days. Taking Middlemarch and the Ironbrand trilogy by John Morressy.
I didn’t enjoy Spook quite as much as Stiff, I think because there’s really so little in defensible science that has investigated life after death. I mean, I enjoy “bad” science, but I’d prefer good scientific method in looking into that bad science.
Plus, in Spook, she has no occasion for using the phrase “Do Me Chicken.”
I am enjoying Michael Lawrence’s, Withern Rise Trilogy.
I have finished the first, A Crack in the Line and am now onto Small Eternities. I like his naming conventions for both titles and characters, personally. His writing is pretty good, as far as modern fantasy writers are concerned.
I recently finished George MacDonald Fraser’s Royal Flash, the second installment of the Flashman series. I really enjoyed it – has anyone catalogued and tracked the various euphemisms for sex that Fraser has Flashy employ in his various romps through the sheets (not so many in this one, I have to say!)? The third one will have to wait a bit, though.
I’ve also made use of some time off for some frivolous reading and re-reading:
Jeff Smith’s complete Bone. I’m still in love with this comic – the best graphic novel I’ve read so far. In which best means “enjoyable” – Watchmen or The Dark Knight Returns are rather deeper.
Oliver Sacks’s Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. Enjoyable. A bit rambling, and rather unconnected, and not exactly shot through with explanations. But a good read.
H.P. Willmott’s The Last Century of Sea Power. THe first volume. I’m ambivalent about it – it’s interesting as always for Willmott’s analysis, but it could have done with an editor, or a better editor.
I’m currently reading:
Richard Matheson’s I am Legend. Very good. Will be done tomorrow, I think, as it is so short, but it’s an interesting book, and much better than the film.
H.P. Lovecraft’s Omnibus III. This has “The Call of Cthulhu”, which is pretty good, I have to say – much better than the stuff in the other anthology I read. I’m looking forward to a number of other stories in that collection.
Still, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pilot. It’s just not Matheson, and so is slow going…
Re-reading HST’s Proud Highway: Saga Of A Desperate Southern Gentleman.
I love the peek inside Hunter’s personality with all his personal letters. It’s amazing that he kept carbon copies of them all to be compiled, quite frankly.
I read the first volume of that, covering 1955-67, but not subsequent ones. (Or was there only one sequel?) I especially liked the letter he sent out to creditors to get them off his back, in which he made like a demented disease carrier. As I recall, he claimed it worked lots of times.
Vanished Smile: The Mysterious Theft of Mona Lisa by R.A. Scotti. This seemed to be getting a lot of press, but I was disappointed. The story of the theft of the Mona Lisa is interesting, but wow, the writing here was terrible. Read the wikipedia article instead.
The Intuitionist* by Colson Whitehead. I wasn’t sure what to expect from this, but I ended up liking it a lot. I’m not sure there’s a good way to describe it that doesn’t make it sound awful … it’s set in a alternate reality version of NYC, and there’s a crime involving elevator inspectors who have this crazy organization that’s like a combo of a medieval guild and a Samuel Gompers union, and it’s about race and integration.
Just started The Whiskey Rebels, which is a historical mystery that takes place right after the American Revolution.
My book club has adopted a quasi-rule: if the book hasn’t hooked you after 50 pages, put it down and walk away, guilt-free. It very likely won’t get any better. Life’s too short to force yourself to the end of a book you don’t have to read and that you hate anyway.
AuntiePam, I read The Last Unicorn in high school and was also underwhelmed. I’ve felt no desire to give it another try.
I finished The Hobbit, humored myself by picking up The Silmarillion, then promptly put it down after another failed attempt at reading it and now I’m reading Lord of the Rings.
I’ll probably read The Wizard of Oz after that, if I can find it at the library.
Amy Tan’s The Opposite of Fate - Her first nonfiction work that shares her thoughts on how she escaped the expectations of her past and created her own destiny. She contemplates how things happen (in her life and beyond) but always returns to the question of fate and its opposites: choices, influences, attitudes, and lucky accidents that shape us all. Tan’s fictional works have never made an impression on me, but I feel like I should reread them now that I have more insight on the author.
Dai Sijie’s Balzac et La Petite Tailleuse Chinoise - I reread this book by the same author of Le Complexe de Di. It follows two teenage boys going through “re-education” as Mao’s Cultural Revolution swept through China. They come across a suitcase of western literature that ferrets them into a vast world of grandiose ideals, passion, and love and illusion. English title is: Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
I just started Cloud Atlas. The first story ends mid-sentence at the bottom of the page - if I hadn’t known ahead of time the book was going to consist of nested stories, I would have thought it was a misprint. I’m on the third story now, and so far I like it very much.
