![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shoveling books into the balls
Oct. 1st, 2024 11:52 amRead a bunch of books in September, most of them good. notably, I finally finished Purity and Danger and no longer have to talk about how I’m going to finally finish it. Kind of bummed out that I’m not reading Rebecca anymore, but I am making my way through life well enough without her.
Books I loved:
The Duel, Chekhov - Is this cheating. Is it cheating to put Chekhov first? I got the Pevear translation, and it kind of blows. Fine. Whatever. I can microadjust in my head. The novella itself is really amazing, in the ways you expect from Chekhov (sober, crystalline depictions of human fallibility and social dynamics) and maybe ways you wouldn’t: he’s very, very funny. Read this full of grasping envy.
Encounters with the Archdruid, McPhee - Is it cheating to say you love a McPhee book… the conceit of this is, “what if we took the former president of the Sierra Club, an incredibly annoying guy, and sent him on three trips with his natural enemies.” John, you are going to get someone killed. Incredibly entertaining and tense book, lighter than some of his others.
I also read some books that I found serviceable or enjoyed but not so much as to tell people that I’ve read them. In addition to these pleasant reads, I finished Manhattan Beach by Egan, a book which has solidified my dislike of her works’ hmm, banal morality? utterly dull interior lives of her characters? My overwhelming impression of this was that it was exceedingly conventional. I've talked about my irritation with A Visit from the Goon Squad, both for its reputation (post-modern! innovative! etc.) and as an actual text (its associative pairings have no surprises), and reading this made me dislike Goon Squad more. A case of "nothing wrong, nothing right" here, I think.
That’s it for this month.
Books I loved:
The Duel, Chekhov - Is this cheating. Is it cheating to put Chekhov first? I got the Pevear translation, and it kind of blows. Fine. Whatever. I can microadjust in my head. The novella itself is really amazing, in the ways you expect from Chekhov (sober, crystalline depictions of human fallibility and social dynamics) and maybe ways you wouldn’t: he’s very, very funny. Read this full of grasping envy.
Encounters with the Archdruid, McPhee - Is it cheating to say you love a McPhee book… the conceit of this is, “what if we took the former president of the Sierra Club, an incredibly annoying guy, and sent him on three trips with his natural enemies.” John, you are going to get someone killed. Incredibly entertaining and tense book, lighter than some of his others.
I also read some books that I found serviceable or enjoyed but not so much as to tell people that I’ve read them. In addition to these pleasant reads, I finished Manhattan Beach by Egan, a book which has solidified my dislike of her works’ hmm, banal morality? utterly dull interior lives of her characters? My overwhelming impression of this was that it was exceedingly conventional. I've talked about my irritation with A Visit from the Goon Squad, both for its reputation (post-modern! innovative! etc.) and as an actual text (its associative pairings have no surprises), and reading this made me dislike Goon Squad more. A case of "nothing wrong, nothing right" here, I think.
That’s it for this month.
