Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I liked Siobhan Dowd’s Bog Child so much that I must have put A Swift Pure Cry on my list without reading the summary, because about a third of the way through the book I was getting Vibes, finally looked it up, and glumly learned that yes, indeed! this is a book about an accidental teenage pregnancy.

Accidentally teenage pregnancy is about on the same level as cancer on the list of “items I wish to avoid in my leisure reading,” so as you can imagine I wailed and gnashed my teeth. However, if that’s something you DO like, I actually think Dowd’s writing here is both tighter and more poetic than in Bog Child... and, uh, I’ll definitely be reading the summaries before I venture any more of her books!

I also finished Janet Flanner’s Paris Was Yesterday: 1925-1939, a collection of her notes to the New Yorker about happenings in Paris. As pleasure reading it left something to be desired - I wanted the notes to be longer, or more detailed, or just more something than most of them were - but it would be a fantastic research resource about Paris life in those years, and also the western European experience of the run-up to World War II.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve read the first chapter of R. A. MacAvoy The Grey Horse, and so far the titular stallion has more or less run away with Anrai, the elderly hostler who found him standing atop a round hillock above the sea. It’s my belief that this horse may be one of the Good Folk, but we shall see.

What I Plan to Read Next

Racing to finish up some books before I head to New York City next Monday! My main goal is to finish Megan Whalen Turner’s Return of the Thief and wrap up my Queen’s Thief review sequence.

Comments

[thisbluespirit]

There aren't many other Siobhan Dowd books, sadly, so it isn't an overly useful lesson - to bring your other nope into it, I'm afraid she died of cancer only a couple of years after she started writing properly. There's a not as good book for younger readers (The London Eye Mystery), but there is also Solace of the Road (I can't recall if I read Solace or not, but it's YA like the other two.)

(I was at the Carnegie medal ceremony the year it was posthumously awarded to her for Bog Child - her sister/s came to pick it up, I think, and there's a trust founded in her name.:-/)