Reading Wednesday
Dec. 3rd, 2014 05:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhWhat did you just finish?
Song of the Cuckoo Bird by Amulya Malladi. A novel covering a span from the late 1950s up until the early 2000s, about a group of people (mostly women) living in an ashram in Andhra Pradesh, India. The main character (sort of; the narrative switches focus between a lot of people) is Kokila, who first comes to the ashram when she's 11 years old, waiting for her arranged marriage to go through; instead, she ends up spending her life there, having an affair with an old man, taking over the running of the business side of the ashram, briefly volunteering at a leprosy clinic, taking typing classes, adopting a child, making friends and losing them, and so on. There was a lot of potential in this book – ideas, plots, and characters – but ultimately it just felt too dispersed and rushed for anything to carry weight. People are constantly appearing and disappearing, developments of relationships and character growth that take years are skimmed over in a paragraph, huge amounts of time are randomly skipped, and every time you get invested in one character or one plot, it's over and something new is happening to someone else. A book about this many people and this much time would need to be an epic door-stopper to be able to execute it well, but Song of the Cuckoo Bird just ends up rushed and shallow, all show and no tell. I much preferred Malladi's other books.
Ran Away by Barbara Hambly. I'll need to type up my thoughts for FFA book club soon - probably later today, actually - but I haven't done it yet, and so I will be lazy and defer this to next week.
What are you currently reading?
The Isolation Door by Anish Majumdar. A novel about a Bengali-American family dealing with the mother's schizophrenia. I got this off of NetGalley and so far am not enjoying it.
Moby Dick by Herman Melville. I've actually read this before and enjoyed it then, but it was under unusual circumstances (no TV, no internet, no distractions more entertaining than 150-year old novels about whales), so I wanted to see if it would hold up. So far, so good!
Song of the Cuckoo Bird by Amulya Malladi. A novel covering a span from the late 1950s up until the early 2000s, about a group of people (mostly women) living in an ashram in Andhra Pradesh, India. The main character (sort of; the narrative switches focus between a lot of people) is Kokila, who first comes to the ashram when she's 11 years old, waiting for her arranged marriage to go through; instead, she ends up spending her life there, having an affair with an old man, taking over the running of the business side of the ashram, briefly volunteering at a leprosy clinic, taking typing classes, adopting a child, making friends and losing them, and so on. There was a lot of potential in this book – ideas, plots, and characters – but ultimately it just felt too dispersed and rushed for anything to carry weight. People are constantly appearing and disappearing, developments of relationships and character growth that take years are skimmed over in a paragraph, huge amounts of time are randomly skipped, and every time you get invested in one character or one plot, it's over and something new is happening to someone else. A book about this many people and this much time would need to be an epic door-stopper to be able to execute it well, but Song of the Cuckoo Bird just ends up rushed and shallow, all show and no tell. I much preferred Malladi's other books.
Ran Away by Barbara Hambly. I'll need to type up my thoughts for FFA book club soon - probably later today, actually - but I haven't done it yet, and so I will be lazy and defer this to next week.
What are you currently reading?
The Isolation Door by Anish Majumdar. A novel about a Bengali-American family dealing with the mother's schizophrenia. I got this off of NetGalley and so far am not enjoying it.
Moby Dick by Herman Melville. I've actually read this before and enjoyed it then, but it was under unusual circumstances (no TV, no internet, no distractions more entertaining than 150-year old novels about whales), so I wanted to see if it would hold up. So far, so good!
