Reading Wednesday
Aug. 28th, 2013 02:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhWhat did you just finish?
Bombay Time by Thrity Umrigar. This was an excellent novel, which I recommend much more highly than the very similarly themed Rohinton Mistry I read last week. This is more or less the story of one wedding party and the various guests (most of whom live in the same apartment building), but the POV switches from one character to another, and includes lots of flashbacks, so it is also the story of these people's lives in the decades from the early 50s to the late 90s. Though it manages to cover a lot of issues through that form (failed vs successful marriages, immigration vs staying in India, religion, widowhood, music, love, aspirations, class), I particularly liked the balance of the mostly middle-class characters with the problem of poverty in Bombay.
Spitting Blood: The History of Tuberculosis by Helen Bynum. I finally finished this book! Which is not at all the fault of the book– which was very interesting and well-written– and more to do with my difficulty in reading about people bleeding from the lungs, especially while I was eating. This book is incredibly informative, and the only complaint I really have is that I would have liked even more information; it's very focused on the European and American history of the disease, and more about Asia, Africa, and the Americas would have been nice. I also (unsurprisingly) was very interested in the bits about the construction of tuberculosis as a Romantic disease in the 1800s, and would have loved to read more on that.
I was horrified to discover that there was a major TB epidemic in NYC in the 1970s and 80s, with Harlem in 1992 having one of the highest infection rates in the world. I don't have anything to say about that other than WHAT THE FUCK, but I just thought more people should know this fact.
What are you currently reading?
Jim Corbett's India - Selections by R.E. Hawkins by Jim Corbett. Essays by a famous hunter-turned-conservationist from the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties by Lucy Moore. Nonfiction collection of snapshots of various people and events in America in the 1920s. I started reading this because I had an idea for a Benjamin January Harlem Renaissance AU, but further research has only confirmed my immense lack of knowledge about the period, so that's probably not going to happen. But you should see how much jazz I've acquired this week!
Bombay Time by Thrity Umrigar. This was an excellent novel, which I recommend much more highly than the very similarly themed Rohinton Mistry I read last week. This is more or less the story of one wedding party and the various guests (most of whom live in the same apartment building), but the POV switches from one character to another, and includes lots of flashbacks, so it is also the story of these people's lives in the decades from the early 50s to the late 90s. Though it manages to cover a lot of issues through that form (failed vs successful marriages, immigration vs staying in India, religion, widowhood, music, love, aspirations, class), I particularly liked the balance of the mostly middle-class characters with the problem of poverty in Bombay.
Spitting Blood: The History of Tuberculosis by Helen Bynum. I finally finished this book! Which is not at all the fault of the book– which was very interesting and well-written– and more to do with my difficulty in reading about people bleeding from the lungs, especially while I was eating. This book is incredibly informative, and the only complaint I really have is that I would have liked even more information; it's very focused on the European and American history of the disease, and more about Asia, Africa, and the Americas would have been nice. I also (unsurprisingly) was very interested in the bits about the construction of tuberculosis as a Romantic disease in the 1800s, and would have loved to read more on that.
I was horrified to discover that there was a major TB epidemic in NYC in the 1970s and 80s, with Harlem in 1992 having one of the highest infection rates in the world. I don't have anything to say about that other than WHAT THE FUCK, but I just thought more people should know this fact.
What are you currently reading?
Jim Corbett's India - Selections by R.E. Hawkins by Jim Corbett. Essays by a famous hunter-turned-conservationist from the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties by Lucy Moore. Nonfiction collection of snapshots of various people and events in America in the 1920s. I started reading this because I had an idea for a Benjamin January Harlem Renaissance AU, but further research has only confirmed my immense lack of knowledge about the period, so that's probably not going to happen. But you should see how much jazz I've acquired this week!
