Reading Wednesday
Sep. 4th, 2013 02:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhWhat did you just finish?
Jim Corbett's India - Selections by R.E. Hawkins by Jim Corbett. I liked this much more than I expected to! A series of non-fiction essays about hunting and general jungle-life in the early 1900s, which were all very exciting and interesting. I think I was put off by expecting the prose to be very Victorian/Edwardian, but in fact it was very well-written and quite readable.
An Atlas of Impossible Longing by Anuradha Roy. This, eh, not so readable. A novel about three generations of a family in early-to-mid 1900s in Bengal, it's one of those books where all the marriages are unhappy and no one's life quite works out and everything is full of ennui and malaise and decaying homes are an important symbol. Literary fiction, why do I ever read you? It never quite works out.
Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties by Lucy Moore. This, however, was excellent! A series of snapshots about people (Charles Lindbergh, Al Capone, the Fitzgeralds) or topics (Prohibition, the stock market, expats in Paris, the KKK) to try and create a comprehensive portrait of America in the 1920s. My one complaint was that there's a lot of breadth to this book, but not much depth, and there's a lot of topics I would have loved to read more about. There was a couple I didn't feel the need for more, though (Charles Lindbergh, boxing), so I suppose I can't complain too much.
What are you currently reading?
Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age by Kevin Boyle. Nonfiction about a black doctor who moves up from the South and gets accused of murder. The only way this could be more exactly what I want to read right now is if it was NYC instead of Detroit.
And that's it at the moment, since I just finished An Atlas of Impossible Longing a few hours ago and haven't yet started a new South Asian book.
Jim Corbett's India - Selections by R.E. Hawkins by Jim Corbett. I liked this much more than I expected to! A series of non-fiction essays about hunting and general jungle-life in the early 1900s, which were all very exciting and interesting. I think I was put off by expecting the prose to be very Victorian/Edwardian, but in fact it was very well-written and quite readable.
An Atlas of Impossible Longing by Anuradha Roy. This, eh, not so readable. A novel about three generations of a family in early-to-mid 1900s in Bengal, it's one of those books where all the marriages are unhappy and no one's life quite works out and everything is full of ennui and malaise and decaying homes are an important symbol. Literary fiction, why do I ever read you? It never quite works out.
Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties by Lucy Moore. This, however, was excellent! A series of snapshots about people (Charles Lindbergh, Al Capone, the Fitzgeralds) or topics (Prohibition, the stock market, expats in Paris, the KKK) to try and create a comprehensive portrait of America in the 1920s. My one complaint was that there's a lot of breadth to this book, but not much depth, and there's a lot of topics I would have loved to read more about. There was a couple I didn't feel the need for more, though (Charles Lindbergh, boxing), so I suppose I can't complain too much.
What are you currently reading?
Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age by Kevin Boyle. Nonfiction about a black doctor who moves up from the South and gets accused of murder. The only way this could be more exactly what I want to read right now is if it was NYC instead of Detroit.
And that's it at the moment, since I just finished An Atlas of Impossible Longing a few hours ago and haven't yet started a new South Asian book.
