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wishfulclicking) wrote2011-03-24 05:19 pm
wishfulclicking) wrote2011-03-24 05:19 pm
Entry tags:
Taking stock of what I've read
Since 2011 I've read twelve books, a rundown (in reverse chronological order):
Lover's Dictionary by David Levithan
Nation by Terry Pratchett
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula LeGuin
Before I Fall and Delirium by Lauren Oliver
The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich
Among Others by Jo Walton
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
The Pushcart Book of Poetry
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
There was moment after I finished The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake where I hit a reading slum where nothing was really fulfilling my desires. The next two books--The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and Ender's Game--were both disappointments for different reasons and Among Others lived up to my expectation for it not to live up to they hype for anyone who didn't share a similar fannish background of the protagonist and who wasn't completely wowed by the language to overlook that issue. The prose I was reading let me down so I turned to poetry and came across this small collection from Adrienne Rich, a poet I found in the Pushcart book I read in January.
A resolution, more like an idea of something I should do, was to mention the books I'm reading to catch my responses towards them. I'm failing on this because with time came distance and with both of these mere shadows of what I felt at the time when I hit the final page.
Reading Lauren Oliver's books consecutively made me attuned to her style (pretty, not overly wordy and easy to float on), her positives (good with capturing immediate emotions; providing depth to surface unpleasant characters without erasing what might make them distasteful) and her shortcoming (worldbuilding isn't really strong in Delirium) but I enjoyed her enough that I started to follow her on goodreads.
The Lathe of Heaven was decent. I've never gone mad over LeGuin's prose but I do like the ideas she presents in her novels. The whole premise of a man being able to manipulate reality with his dreams was, on the surface, a hook, which was unfortunately kind of dulled by the maddeningly passive protagonist; but I think the main character, George, had to be protagonist in order for the story to succeed, he definitely had a foil in Dr. Haber. Nation was a pleasing read. It felt like someone was telling me a story and there was this ease in getting on with things until the action really came towards the end. Both this, and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, had the pairing not get together for reasons I completely understood, though they frustrated me. (At least TPSOLC let me dream that they hooked up later.) Truth: I got almost a little misty in Books-a-Million reading the ending of Nation.
Lover's Dictionary is a collection of snapshots of a relationship, highlighting the good, bad, and the in between of it all by each letter of the alphabet. Mistakenly, I didn't really pick up on the fact that each section was devoted to the same relationship, but that's just my distracted reading. It's told in a manner where the gender of the couple isn't fully known, but it reads as a homosexual couple but if you agree that a girl could play the role of the boy in The Sound of Music in the third grade, then you can also read the couple as a heterosexual couple, with the male being bisexual.
Lover's Dictionary by David Levithan
Nation by Terry Pratchett
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula LeGuin
Before I Fall and Delirium by Lauren Oliver
The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich
Among Others by Jo Walton
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
The Pushcart Book of Poetry
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
There was moment after I finished The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake where I hit a reading slum where nothing was really fulfilling my desires. The next two books--The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and Ender's Game--were both disappointments for different reasons and Among Others lived up to my expectation for it not to live up to they hype for anyone who didn't share a similar fannish background of the protagonist and who wasn't completely wowed by the language to overlook that issue. The prose I was reading let me down so I turned to poetry and came across this small collection from Adrienne Rich, a poet I found in the Pushcart book I read in January.
A resolution, more like an idea of something I should do, was to mention the books I'm reading to catch my responses towards them. I'm failing on this because with time came distance and with both of these mere shadows of what I felt at the time when I hit the final page.
Reading Lauren Oliver's books consecutively made me attuned to her style (pretty, not overly wordy and easy to float on), her positives (good with capturing immediate emotions; providing depth to surface unpleasant characters without erasing what might make them distasteful) and her shortcoming (worldbuilding isn't really strong in Delirium) but I enjoyed her enough that I started to follow her on goodreads.
The Lathe of Heaven was decent. I've never gone mad over LeGuin's prose but I do like the ideas she presents in her novels. The whole premise of a man being able to manipulate reality with his dreams was, on the surface, a hook, which was unfortunately kind of dulled by the maddeningly passive protagonist; but I think the main character, George, had to be protagonist in order for the story to succeed, he definitely had a foil in Dr. Haber. Nation was a pleasing read. It felt like someone was telling me a story and there was this ease in getting on with things until the action really came towards the end. Both this, and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, had the pairing not get together for reasons I completely understood, though they frustrated me. (At least TPSOLC let me dream that they hooked up later.) Truth: I got almost a little misty in Books-a-Million reading the ending of Nation.
Lover's Dictionary is a collection of snapshots of a relationship, highlighting the good, bad, and the in between of it all by each letter of the alphabet. Mistakenly, I didn't really pick up on the fact that each section was devoted to the same relationship, but that's just my distracted reading. It's told in a manner where the gender of the couple isn't fully known, but it reads as a homosexual couple but if you agree that a girl could play the role of the boy in The Sound of Music in the third grade, then you can also read the couple as a heterosexual couple, with the male being bisexual.