wasabi_poptart: (books)
In the past ten years, you could probably count the total number of books I managed to read on the fingers of one hand, but lately it seems I've finally gotten over any residual trauma of grad school (I had to read a book a night for two and half years--NO LIE) and resumed reading again for pleasure, just like I did before it became my job.

So far this year I've read:

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell
Fool
The Professor and the Madman
The Graveyard Book

Four books doesn't seem like a lot (one of them being a kid's book, even), but it's an average of one a month.

I also got about halfway through Istanbul: Memories and the City by Orhan Pamuk, but I think maybe it will mean more to me after I've been and I will know first-hand what he's talking about.

Next up: A Short History of Everything by Bill Bryson, which was recommended by my neurologist ... I figure a brain doctor, of all people, would know a good book when he read it.
wasabi_poptart: (books)
I really did not like Fool )

So now I'm onto something else: The Professor and the Madman, which I found in a box marked "FREE BOOKS" on the Avenue last year. It's about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary.
wasabi_poptart: (python)
There's something about Christopher Moore that's just too, I dunno ... too glib. Too clever. Like when you get among a crowd of geeks all trying too hard to be all witty and smarmy and it becomes a contest to see who can cram the most Monty Python and Black Adder references into a single sentence and it's just fecking annoying. Like it would be so much more enjoyable if it didn't seem so forced, so much like a performance.

I'm not saying it's not entertaining, just that it would be a heckuva lot more charming if it wasn't trying so hard.

(Maybe I probably shouldn't have picked up another book so hard on the heels of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell; it's going to be a while before I come down from that one.)
wasabi_poptart: (sinner)
for [livejournal.com profile] alero et al . . .

read this story and tell me if you still feel the same way about those cute little Mormon boys!

"Good Country People" by Flannery O'Connor
wasabi_poptart: (sinner)
The Night of the Iguana is so awesome.

It's like Tennessee Williams was smoking a pound of crack while reading the collected works of Graham Greene.
wasabi_poptart: (theda)
One of my pre-Internet obsessions hobbies was collecting everything by Tanith Lee I could get my hands on. This was a challenge, owing to her carefully-maintained status as perpetually out-of-print cult author, and I would spend hours poking through used bookstores and yard sales and library sales and such to see what I could find. I managed to amass quite a collection, too.

This weekend, while I was at Fluid Movement practice, Maggie got bored (and maybe a titch resentful) and ate the copy of Cyrion I'd foolishly left within her reach on my nightstand.

When I found it at Haslam's in St. Pete eight years ago, it made my whole fucking week. However, on the Alibris website, there are 31 available copies. You can order one, or all 31, in less time than it takes to grab a naughty dog by the collar and haul her out to the backyard.

Don't get me wrong. I think the access to and availability of goods and services provided by the Internet is a miraculous, wonderous thing. But there's a definite trade-off.

Thanks to sites like Alibris, anybody who wants a copy of Cyrion can have it, but there's no fun in the getting anymore.
wasabi_poptart: (ciggie-girl)
I've changed my mind about Neal Pollack. There's nothing sexy about bad parenting.

salon article
wasabi_poptart: (freud)
I finished Devil in the Details last night. I enjoyed it very much, except for one or two factual errors )

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