Admiring the scenery
Jun. 8th, 2008 06:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraI spent three hours yesterday as part of a team running, walking, clambering and sliding around lots of very steep muddy countryside looking for very specific portions of it (rogaining), which actually went better than I'd feared given that my co-navigator got us lost about eight times on the way to the actual event. Today, therefore, I am doing a lot of lying around, thus prompting me to find my usb stick and catch up with my booklog.
Patrick Gale, Notes from an Exhibition. I like Patrick Gale’s books, but they don’t stick much – The Facts of Life is probably the only one I’ve read that I’d want to re-read. This one, which threads back through the life of a painter, anchored and directed by her paintings, has some very nice moments (the art, some of the characters, the feeling that these are real people whose actions are coherent to themselves) and unreels smoothly enough, but there are also some loose ends that never seem fully dealt with (the circumstances of her death) or irrelevant to the storyline (the sister plotline). A good library book read.
Jodi Picoult, My sister's keeper. Mostly re-read, as I skimmed this in an airport bookshop some months ago, fast enough that I’d managed to amalgamate two of the characters, and all I’d taken away from it was a burning anger at the ending. I am still very annoyed with it, as it seems to me to sacrifice the characters for the sake of having an unexpected twist, and it makes me wonder why I bothered with all the rest of the book up to that point. This is also one of those books where the first response to any interpersonal disagreement is apparently to hire a lawyer.
Georgette Heyer, The Foundling. Coddled and overprotected duke stands up for himself and sorts out everyone else’s life. Nicely done, as with all her books, although a little too heavy on the nobility as birthright theory (then again, one of my favourites of hers is These Old Shades, so I am steadfastly hypocritical on this) and I kept getting Gilly’s various relatives mixed up. Enjoyable.
Elizabeth Berg, The pull of the moon. A woman runs away from her life, thinks about it, and goes back again. There are some nice moments here, but I didn’t end up caring enough about her to take me further than that; the characters she meets, as well, never quite tip the balance over from being reflections of the main character into being actual entities in their own right. And the last 60 pages turned out to be first chapter previews of a number of the author’s other books, which is just irritating.
Louisa Alcott, Little Women. This was never one of my all-time favourites as a child (I preferred What Katy Did). I do enjoy the moments of everyday life that, now, are as alien as some of the things I read about in science fiction, and she does do the displacement of adolescence well – wanting to belong to a peer group and the agony of not quite knowing what to do or say.
Patrick Gale, Notes from an Exhibition. I like Patrick Gale’s books, but they don’t stick much – The Facts of Life is probably the only one I’ve read that I’d want to re-read. This one, which threads back through the life of a painter, anchored and directed by her paintings, has some very nice moments (the art, some of the characters, the feeling that these are real people whose actions are coherent to themselves) and unreels smoothly enough, but there are also some loose ends that never seem fully dealt with (the circumstances of her death) or irrelevant to the storyline (the sister plotline). A good library book read.
Jodi Picoult, My sister's keeper. Mostly re-read, as I skimmed this in an airport bookshop some months ago, fast enough that I’d managed to amalgamate two of the characters, and all I’d taken away from it was a burning anger at the ending. I am still very annoyed with it, as it seems to me to sacrifice the characters for the sake of having an unexpected twist, and it makes me wonder why I bothered with all the rest of the book up to that point. This is also one of those books where the first response to any interpersonal disagreement is apparently to hire a lawyer.
Georgette Heyer, The Foundling. Coddled and overprotected duke stands up for himself and sorts out everyone else’s life. Nicely done, as with all her books, although a little too heavy on the nobility as birthright theory (then again, one of my favourites of hers is These Old Shades, so I am steadfastly hypocritical on this) and I kept getting Gilly’s various relatives mixed up. Enjoyable.
Elizabeth Berg, The pull of the moon. A woman runs away from her life, thinks about it, and goes back again. There are some nice moments here, but I didn’t end up caring enough about her to take me further than that; the characters she meets, as well, never quite tip the balance over from being reflections of the main character into being actual entities in their own right. And the last 60 pages turned out to be first chapter previews of a number of the author’s other books, which is just irritating.
Louisa Alcott, Little Women. This was never one of my all-time favourites as a child (I preferred What Katy Did). I do enjoy the moments of everyday life that, now, are as alien as some of the things I read about in science fiction, and she does do the displacement of adolescence well – wanting to belong to a peer group and the agony of not quite knowing what to do or say.
