Wednesday Reading Meme
Jul. 24th, 2019 08:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Sam Eastland’s Berlin Red, which is bafflingly poorly copy-edited. I don’t mean just that there are typos (although there are typos), but there are also bizarre formatting issues. For instance, many of the two-line paragraphs are indented on both the first and second line, so you think you’re getting a new paragraph and then surprise! it’s just the old one, continuing on. Or, conversely, you’ll have two lines of dialogue smushed together, like so:
“Yes?” said Kirov. “I think we should stop for the night,” said Pekkala.
I don’t understand how the book got like this and it’s SO distracting and frustrating. It’s the final book in the series, too; it deserved better.
What I’m Reading Now
I’ve begun reading Mario Giordano's Auntie Poldi and the Sicilian Lions, which is pretty good so far! Lots of Sicilian countryside and an alcohol-sodden older woman for the detective, which is an unusual combination.
And I’ve continued on in Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which served up this fascinating fact this week:
“If you take ordinary grasshoppers of any of several species from any of a number of the world’s dry regions - including the Rocky Mountains - and rear them in glass jars under crowded conditions, they go into the migratory phase. That is, they turn into locusts. They literally and physically change from Jekyll to Hyde before your eyes… They are restless, excitable, voracious. You now have jars full of plague.”
Isn’t that cool? I always wondered where locusts came from.
But it also served up a harrowing chapter about death, the omnipresence of death in the natural world, and the human inability to quite comprehend or cope with that fact. Thanks, I guess?
“Our excessive emotions are so patently painful and harmful to us as a species that I can hardly believe that they evolved. Other creatures manage to have effective matings and even stable societies without great emotions, and they have a bonus in that they need not ever mourn. (But some higher animals have emotions that we think are similar to ours: dogs, elephants, otters, and the sea mammals mourn their dead. Why do that to an otter? What creator would be so cruel, not to kill otters, but to let them care?)”
What I Plan to Read Next
Your enthusiastic recommendations of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency have convinced me to give it a try! As soon as I catch up on my backlog.
Sam Eastland’s Berlin Red, which is bafflingly poorly copy-edited. I don’t mean just that there are typos (although there are typos), but there are also bizarre formatting issues. For instance, many of the two-line paragraphs are indented on both the first and second line, so you think you’re getting a new paragraph and then surprise! it’s just the old one, continuing on. Or, conversely, you’ll have two lines of dialogue smushed together, like so:
“Yes?” said Kirov. “I think we should stop for the night,” said Pekkala.
I don’t understand how the book got like this and it’s SO distracting and frustrating. It’s the final book in the series, too; it deserved better.
What I’m Reading Now
I’ve begun reading Mario Giordano's Auntie Poldi and the Sicilian Lions, which is pretty good so far! Lots of Sicilian countryside and an alcohol-sodden older woman for the detective, which is an unusual combination.
And I’ve continued on in Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which served up this fascinating fact this week:
“If you take ordinary grasshoppers of any of several species from any of a number of the world’s dry regions - including the Rocky Mountains - and rear them in glass jars under crowded conditions, they go into the migratory phase. That is, they turn into locusts. They literally and physically change from Jekyll to Hyde before your eyes… They are restless, excitable, voracious. You now have jars full of plague.”
Isn’t that cool? I always wondered where locusts came from.
But it also served up a harrowing chapter about death, the omnipresence of death in the natural world, and the human inability to quite comprehend or cope with that fact. Thanks, I guess?
“Our excessive emotions are so patently painful and harmful to us as a species that I can hardly believe that they evolved. Other creatures manage to have effective matings and even stable societies without great emotions, and they have a bonus in that they need not ever mourn. (But some higher animals have emotions that we think are similar to ours: dogs, elephants, otters, and the sea mammals mourn their dead. Why do that to an otter? What creator would be so cruel, not to kill otters, but to let them care?)”
What I Plan to Read Next
Your enthusiastic recommendations of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency have convinced me to give it a try! As soon as I catch up on my backlog.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-25 05:30 pm (UTC)The comforting thing about evolution as an origin story is that no one did that to otters and no one did it to us. It's just history and plenty of it.
I've been hearing things, mostly good, about the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency for years. Maybe I should get with the program, too.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-25 09:05 pm (UTC)Maybe we should start the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency as a pick-me-up if we ever finish Kristin Lavransdattar. If nothing else, they will be MUCH shorter.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-26 02:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-26 03:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-26 03:45 pm (UTC)I'll be interested to hear what you think about the Ladies' Detective Agency; I'm in a v. small minority of nay-sayers about that series, I think.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-30 08:58 pm (UTC)We'll see how I feel about No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. It may be some time before I read it... I've sort of inundated myself with Russian food memoirs at the moment.