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osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Courtney Milan’s A Kiss for Midwinter, which I didn’t like quite as much as the other Brothers Sinister books that I’ve read. Lydia continues to be a doll, but her paramour - I’ve forgotten his name - seems just a little bit too full of himself. He has a few affecting scenes where he struggles to care for his aging and increasingly demented father, but otherwise I mostly wanted Lydia to smack him.
To be fair, Lydia also spent a large percentage of the book yearning to smack him. It’s just that the narrative necessitated that she had a change of heart, and my heart did not change with hers.
Sam Eastland’s The Beast in the Red Forest, the most recent Inspector Pekkala book, which ends - I kid you not - Pekkala, his junior partner Kirov, and Kirov’s fiancee Elisaveta having Friday night dinner together, while Stalin enviously listens in using the bugs he’s put in Pekkala office. He waits until they’re juuuuust sitting down to dinner, and then he has his secretary put through a call to Pekkala, so he can sort of interject himself into this cozy scene.
Book six is probably not going to involve Stalin dispersing them to separate gulags and then wondering why he has no friends (maybe because you send them all to gulags, Stalin?), but I feel like that would be the logical aftermath.
I also - at last! - finished Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, wherein Richard Mayhew defeats not one, but two forces of darkness that have destroyed countless greater foes by sheer force of his own protagonist-hood. Like, seriously, that’s it. In one instant he spears a beast that has dozens of spears sticking out of its hide from other hunters, but Richard’s spear kills it because - I don’t know, it would be way inconvenient for him to die at that point in the story.
I think what bothers me about Gaiman’s writing is that he wants to have the fun parts of darkness without any of the price: the dead don’t actually die, the betrayals don’t really hurt, the danger never feels quite real, and evil is a cartoonish force rather than something that real people can actually become. It’s like he’s mistaken a noir aesthetic for actual darkness.
What I’m Reading Now
Jerome K. Jerome’s Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, which I think is meant to be funny but isn’t, not even in the mild and ponderous way that I found Three Men on a Boat funny. So far it mostly seems to be regurgitated high-flown high Victorian moral rhetoric, with a mild spin that might, I suppose, make it amusing if you lived with the real thing all the time.
Also Nancy Jo Sales’ The Bling Ring: How a Gang of Fame-Obsessed Teens Ripped Off Hollywood and Shocked the World, which I’ve only just started. So far it seems to be steering clear of What’s Wrong with Kids These Days territory; let’s hope this trend continues.
What I Plan to Read Next
My dad and I tromped over to the university library, and I came back with a small haul: George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind, Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s The Velvet Room, and The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600. Because who doesn’t want to read about ancient Greek novels, am I right?
Courtney Milan’s A Kiss for Midwinter, which I didn’t like quite as much as the other Brothers Sinister books that I’ve read. Lydia continues to be a doll, but her paramour - I’ve forgotten his name - seems just a little bit too full of himself. He has a few affecting scenes where he struggles to care for his aging and increasingly demented father, but otherwise I mostly wanted Lydia to smack him.
To be fair, Lydia also spent a large percentage of the book yearning to smack him. It’s just that the narrative necessitated that she had a change of heart, and my heart did not change with hers.
Sam Eastland’s The Beast in the Red Forest, the most recent Inspector Pekkala book, which ends - I kid you not - Pekkala, his junior partner Kirov, and Kirov’s fiancee Elisaveta having Friday night dinner together, while Stalin enviously listens in using the bugs he’s put in Pekkala office. He waits until they’re juuuuust sitting down to dinner, and then he has his secretary put through a call to Pekkala, so he can sort of interject himself into this cozy scene.
Book six is probably not going to involve Stalin dispersing them to separate gulags and then wondering why he has no friends (maybe because you send them all to gulags, Stalin?), but I feel like that would be the logical aftermath.
I also - at last! - finished Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, wherein Richard Mayhew defeats not one, but two forces of darkness that have destroyed countless greater foes by sheer force of his own protagonist-hood. Like, seriously, that’s it. In one instant he spears a beast that has dozens of spears sticking out of its hide from other hunters, but Richard’s spear kills it because - I don’t know, it would be way inconvenient for him to die at that point in the story.
I think what bothers me about Gaiman’s writing is that he wants to have the fun parts of darkness without any of the price: the dead don’t actually die, the betrayals don’t really hurt, the danger never feels quite real, and evil is a cartoonish force rather than something that real people can actually become. It’s like he’s mistaken a noir aesthetic for actual darkness.
What I’m Reading Now
Jerome K. Jerome’s Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, which I think is meant to be funny but isn’t, not even in the mild and ponderous way that I found Three Men on a Boat funny. So far it mostly seems to be regurgitated high-flown high Victorian moral rhetoric, with a mild spin that might, I suppose, make it amusing if you lived with the real thing all the time.
Also Nancy Jo Sales’ The Bling Ring: How a Gang of Fame-Obsessed Teens Ripped Off Hollywood and Shocked the World, which I’ve only just started. So far it seems to be steering clear of What’s Wrong with Kids These Days territory; let’s hope this trend continues.
What I Plan to Read Next
My dad and I tromped over to the university library, and I came back with a small haul: George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind, Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s The Velvet Room, and The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600. Because who doesn’t want to read about ancient Greek novels, am I right?
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Date: 2015-01-28 03:18 pm (UTC)fix your aftertaste of neverwhere by this amazing fic (http://archiveofourown.org/works/121691).
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Date: 2015-01-28 10:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-28 11:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-29 01:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-29 01:50 am (UTC)Ugh, Richard. Clearly he is one of those people who will never be happy anywhere because he's always thinking about how the grass is greener on the other side.
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Date: 2015-01-29 01:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-30 03:11 pm (UTC)My sister-in-law sent me The Night Circus! So I will be reading it.
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Date: 2015-01-30 05:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-31 10:06 am (UTC)