Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Welcome to the beautiful Sinclair family.
No one is a criminal.
No one is an addict.
No one is a failure.

Thus begins E. Lockhart's We Were Liars. With an introduction like that, you just know that the Sinclair family has to be a mess.

This has to be one of the saddest books I've read all year - maybe even THE saddest book I've read all year. The book works by peeling off layers of misinformation and misunderstanding until the heroine, Cadence, finally learns the truth, so it's impossible to explain without spoiling everything. I thought the journey was worth it in the end, but my God, it is really fucking sad.

And not even the Code Name Verity kind of sad, where this experience was terrible for everyone but they're all resilient people and have each other's support and will clearly be okay in the long run. I'm not sure Cadence will be okay. I'm not sure what okay would even look like for Cadence.

Also Charles Finch’s An East End Murder, a short story in the Charles Lenox detective series. I didn’t realize how very short it would be before I read it, and was left feeling rather disappointed, because there wasn’t enough time to really develop the mystery - or, more importantly, for any of the secondary characters to appear.

It’s really the web of relationships between Charles Lenox and Lady Jane and Thomas and Toto and John Dallington and all the other secondary characters that make the series so good. I would have far preferred a short story about them all getting together for a dinner party to discuss the Franco-Prussian War or the latest installment of Middlemarch or whatever, rather than a half-baked mystery about Lenox on his own.

What I’m Reading Now

Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April, a perfectly charming book about four Englishwomen who rent a castle in Italy together for the month of April. There’s a movie, which is beautiful, visually speaking, (how could a movie set in Italy in April be anything but beautiful?) but rather lacking otherwise; so far I’m much preferring the book.

What I Plan to Read Next

Marie Brennan’s The Tropic of Serpents, the sequel to A Natural History of Dragons.

Comments

[evelyn-b.livejournal.com]

We Were Liars sounds like something I would like to read, and possibly then regret reading because it crushed my heart. But maybe it's good for me to get crushed a little every now and then.

I would have far preferred a short story about them all getting together for a dinner party to discuss the Franco-Prussian War or the latest installment of Middlemarch or whatever, rather than a half-baked mystery about Lenox on his own.

This is how I tend to feel about mysteries in general, I think. I'm interested in what the solution turns out to be, but so far at least, I've been more interested in following some characters around, with solving the mystery as a pretext.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I hesitate to say I recommend We Were Liars, because it is so crushing, but if you ever find yourself in a mood to be crushed, I do think it does it absolutely fairly - it's not at all emotionally manipulative.

I think one of the strengths of a mystery series is that it can follow a group of characters as they grow and develop without that growth having to provide the plot for every novel: because the mystery is providing the A-plot, the character's personal lives can develop quite gradually in the background. If character growth has to provide the A-plot, I think there's a tendency for series to grow soap operatic as they go on.

[evelyn-b.livejournal.com]

That's a really good point about A-plots and character growth! I mean, as far as I can tell so far.

I'm reading Died in the Wool right now, by the way, and it's really interesting! Everyone's just sitting around recounting the last days of Flossie Rubrick by firelight in the middle of this isolated mountain range.