Reading Wednesday
May. 21st, 2014 07:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhWhat did you just finish?
Clear Light of Day by Anita Desai. A novel about troubled family relationships in an old family in Delhi; the events of the novel are split half between a dramatic summer in 1947 and half in the modern day (though in this case, I think "modern day" is late 70s or early 80s- it was fairly vague). This reminded me a lot of Faulkner: long stream-of-consciousness passages, an old money family fallen on harder times, the tangled ingrown complicated relationships of the family. Less incest, though! And also there's actually a happy ending, which doesn't at all seem like Faulkner.
Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. A novel split between two stories, both involving Englishwomen in India. In the 1920s, Olivia is the newly arrived wife of a minor British official; she is attracted to and then begins an affair with the local Nawab, a extremely minor Indian noble who is reputed to be involved with various unsavory scandals. In the modern day (which I think is actually the 1970s, again), the granddaughter of Olivia's husband comes to India armed with Olivia's letters, to try and figure out what happened and why. The two women's stories mirror each other in a lot of ways: both have affairs with married Indian men which result in pregnancy, both feel isolated, both are trying to find themselves. I found the modern (unnamed) woman incredibly annoying, particularly when she starts sleeping with a random Englishman (currently living as a homeless monk) not because she wants to or he forces her, but apparently because she just doesn't care enough not to. WHY?
Nearly everything that happens is subtext rather than text, which is occasionally confusing (it took me ages to figure out that the Nawab was also having an affair with Harry, a random hanger-on). That can work sometimes, but I was left feeling as though nothing had happened and nothing mattered. This book won the Booker Prize the year it came out, and has also been made into a movie, but I wasn't very impressed.
Another Man's Moccasins by Craig Johnson. The fourth in the Longmire mystery series, which I have been (very slowly) reading. In this one, Walt's past as a soldier in Vietnam catches up with him when a young Vietnamese woman is found dead, abandoned by the side of the highway, with no ID and only an old photo of Walt in her purse. I didn't find this one quite as engaging as earlier books in the series, though to be fair this is possibly because of formatting issues (there's a lot of flashbacks in the book, and my copy had no indication of when one started or ended). I also found the ultimate solution to the mystery to be a bit dumb, particularly because it relied on an inexplicable wifi network and yet apparently no access to Google Translate.
Prince of Silk and Thorns by Cherry Dare. This is advertized as dubcon porn, starring a prince and his farmboy slave. It is, however, about as un-dubcon-y as it is physically possible to be, given the premise (it's way less dubconny than Captive Prince, for example, while also being way more porny). The premise really only lasts for about a chapter and a half before the book suddenly decides to grow a plot instead, and from then on we have dramatic court intrigue, assassins, food porn, worldbuilding of a vaguely-medieval-Spain sort, woobie backstories, theology involving Lucifer and warrior angels, and a great deal of h/c, mostly of the 'nursing an injured/sick lover' sort. It's unabashedly fun, and completely revels in being composed almost entirely of tropes and 'cool bits'. It's the perfect book to read if you're looking for something a bit silly but so enjoyable.
Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch. A reread! Peter Grant, brand-new police constable, finds out that ghosts, vampires, and magic are real, and gets drafted to serve in London's wizard branch of the police department. I didn't like this quite as much as I did the first time I read it, but it's still a wonderful book. Also I can't wait for the fifth one to come out.
What are you currently reading?
Those Who Hunt the Night by Barbara Hambly. I'M FINALLY READING SOME OTHER HAMBLY BOOKS I DON'T KNOW IF I CAN HANDLE IT. Anyway, vampires, London, lady doctors! I've just begun this so I don't have many thoughts on it.
The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh. A novel about an Indian boy's relationship with his cooler cousin. I bought my copy in a secondhand store, and it's full of the oddest notes in the margins. I'm entirely fascinated by them: occasionally they label something really obvious (a scene where our main characters drinks too much and then behaves strangely is labelled "he's drunk"); occasionally they make bizarre interpretive claims (a little girl in a dress with a giraffe print apparently represents "Africa - exotic", while an argument between a man and a woman is an "attack on femininity"); and occasionally the note-taker is just wrong (a character tells another that she won't eat because she's fasting, but the note-taker says "lying - she's too poor to afford food but doesn't want to admit it" when there's absolutely no indication that this is the case, and in fact the character later spends money fairly freely). The notes keep distracting me from the book itself, but I sort of love them.
Clear Light of Day by Anita Desai. A novel about troubled family relationships in an old family in Delhi; the events of the novel are split half between a dramatic summer in 1947 and half in the modern day (though in this case, I think "modern day" is late 70s or early 80s- it was fairly vague). This reminded me a lot of Faulkner: long stream-of-consciousness passages, an old money family fallen on harder times, the tangled ingrown complicated relationships of the family. Less incest, though! And also there's actually a happy ending, which doesn't at all seem like Faulkner.
Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. A novel split between two stories, both involving Englishwomen in India. In the 1920s, Olivia is the newly arrived wife of a minor British official; she is attracted to and then begins an affair with the local Nawab, a extremely minor Indian noble who is reputed to be involved with various unsavory scandals. In the modern day (which I think is actually the 1970s, again), the granddaughter of Olivia's husband comes to India armed with Olivia's letters, to try and figure out what happened and why. The two women's stories mirror each other in a lot of ways: both have affairs with married Indian men which result in pregnancy, both feel isolated, both are trying to find themselves. I found the modern (unnamed) woman incredibly annoying, particularly when she starts sleeping with a random Englishman (currently living as a homeless monk) not because she wants to or he forces her, but apparently because she just doesn't care enough not to. WHY?
Nearly everything that happens is subtext rather than text, which is occasionally confusing (it took me ages to figure out that the Nawab was also having an affair with Harry, a random hanger-on). That can work sometimes, but I was left feeling as though nothing had happened and nothing mattered. This book won the Booker Prize the year it came out, and has also been made into a movie, but I wasn't very impressed.
Another Man's Moccasins by Craig Johnson. The fourth in the Longmire mystery series, which I have been (very slowly) reading. In this one, Walt's past as a soldier in Vietnam catches up with him when a young Vietnamese woman is found dead, abandoned by the side of the highway, with no ID and only an old photo of Walt in her purse. I didn't find this one quite as engaging as earlier books in the series, though to be fair this is possibly because of formatting issues (there's a lot of flashbacks in the book, and my copy had no indication of when one started or ended). I also found the ultimate solution to the mystery to be a bit dumb, particularly because it relied on an inexplicable wifi network and yet apparently no access to Google Translate.
Prince of Silk and Thorns by Cherry Dare. This is advertized as dubcon porn, starring a prince and his farmboy slave. It is, however, about as un-dubcon-y as it is physically possible to be, given the premise (it's way less dubconny than Captive Prince, for example, while also being way more porny). The premise really only lasts for about a chapter and a half before the book suddenly decides to grow a plot instead, and from then on we have dramatic court intrigue, assassins, food porn, worldbuilding of a vaguely-medieval-Spain sort, woobie backstories, theology involving Lucifer and warrior angels, and a great deal of h/c, mostly of the 'nursing an injured/sick lover' sort. It's unabashedly fun, and completely revels in being composed almost entirely of tropes and 'cool bits'. It's the perfect book to read if you're looking for something a bit silly but so enjoyable.
Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch. A reread! Peter Grant, brand-new police constable, finds out that ghosts, vampires, and magic are real, and gets drafted to serve in London's wizard branch of the police department. I didn't like this quite as much as I did the first time I read it, but it's still a wonderful book. Also I can't wait for the fifth one to come out.
What are you currently reading?
Those Who Hunt the Night by Barbara Hambly. I'M FINALLY READING SOME OTHER HAMBLY BOOKS I DON'T KNOW IF I CAN HANDLE IT. Anyway, vampires, London, lady doctors! I've just begun this so I don't have many thoughts on it.
The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh. A novel about an Indian boy's relationship with his cooler cousin. I bought my copy in a secondhand store, and it's full of the oddest notes in the margins. I'm entirely fascinated by them: occasionally they label something really obvious (a scene where our main characters drinks too much and then behaves strangely is labelled "he's drunk"); occasionally they make bizarre interpretive claims (a little girl in a dress with a giraffe print apparently represents "Africa - exotic", while an argument between a man and a woman is an "attack on femininity"); and occasionally the note-taker is just wrong (a character tells another that she won't eat because she's fasting, but the note-taker says "lying - she's too poor to afford food but doesn't want to admit it" when there's absolutely no indication that this is the case, and in fact the character later spends money fairly freely). The notes keep distracting me from the book itself, but I sort of love them.
