Belated reading meme
Mar. 9th, 2013 03:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraWhat I've just read:
Len Deighton's Mexico Set. Hmm. Bernard does make an impressive number of crashingly bad mistakes in this, not least of which is letting a helpful young woman into the cell with the KGB agent the French have just caught, to deliver a conveniently fatal cup of coffee. He does, however, prove to be capable of holding on to his position with grim determination despite the rather effective methods to frame him - methods largely devised by his wife, Fiona, who turned out to be a longstanding Soviet agent at the end of the last book.
Female characters in spy novels operate under a lot of unhelpful expectations and the ones here are as is traditional largely assessed in terms of their sex appeal, but it's reasonably clear that this is filtered through Bernard's not always accurate viewpoint, and the various women do get to act for their own ends - obviously Fiona, but here Bernard tries to seduce one of the admin workers, Gloria, who is blonde and has large breasts, and after she establishes he is doing this at least partly to back up an office boast she excuses herself briefly before getting him to drive her back home. When Bernard gets back, he finds out that she's cut all of his underwear in half and written "you are a bastard Mr Samson" in lipstick on the window. He is, but he does manage to be more and less than that as well.
John Green's The Fault in Our Stars, a teenagers with cancer novel with real people in it. I liked a lot of this, but wasn't convinced by the book/author plot, and I did see the main other plot coming. Still. It did a lot of good things, and I liked it significantly more than Will Grayson, Will Grayson, and most importantly it managed to avoid stuffing up the ending.
About two million words of fluffy get-together slash fics, much of them featuring at least one protagonist who owns a cute fuzzy animal. It's been that sort of week.
What I'm reading now:
Tim Powers' Hide Me Among the Graves, vampires, Victorians, and the Rossetti family. There's a character with the surname Crawford and references to the Carbonari, and I can tell this is going to drive me buggy until I track down my copy of The Stress of Her Regard. I wasn't wild about Declare and never got through Three Days Til Never, but those may have been me.
What I expect to read next:
More comfort reading, although a few of my favourite Tim Powers books would be nice if I can find the right box.
Len Deighton's Mexico Set. Hmm. Bernard does make an impressive number of crashingly bad mistakes in this, not least of which is letting a helpful young woman into the cell with the KGB agent the French have just caught, to deliver a conveniently fatal cup of coffee. He does, however, prove to be capable of holding on to his position with grim determination despite the rather effective methods to frame him - methods largely devised by his wife, Fiona, who turned out to be a longstanding Soviet agent at the end of the last book.
Female characters in spy novels operate under a lot of unhelpful expectations and the ones here are as is traditional largely assessed in terms of their sex appeal, but it's reasonably clear that this is filtered through Bernard's not always accurate viewpoint, and the various women do get to act for their own ends - obviously Fiona, but here Bernard tries to seduce one of the admin workers, Gloria, who is blonde and has large breasts, and after she establishes he is doing this at least partly to back up an office boast she excuses herself briefly before getting him to drive her back home. When Bernard gets back, he finds out that she's cut all of his underwear in half and written "you are a bastard Mr Samson" in lipstick on the window. He is, but he does manage to be more and less than that as well.
John Green's The Fault in Our Stars, a teenagers with cancer novel with real people in it. I liked a lot of this, but wasn't convinced by the book/author plot, and I did see the main other plot coming. Still. It did a lot of good things, and I liked it significantly more than Will Grayson, Will Grayson, and most importantly it managed to avoid stuffing up the ending.
About two million words of fluffy get-together slash fics, much of them featuring at least one protagonist who owns a cute fuzzy animal. It's been that sort of week.
What I'm reading now:
Tim Powers' Hide Me Among the Graves, vampires, Victorians, and the Rossetti family. There's a character with the surname Crawford and references to the Carbonari, and I can tell this is going to drive me buggy until I track down my copy of The Stress of Her Regard. I wasn't wild about Declare and never got through Three Days Til Never, but those may have been me.
What I expect to read next:
More comfort reading, although a few of my favourite Tim Powers books would be nice if I can find the right box.
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Date: 2013-03-10 06:08 am (UTC)