Currently physically on my bedtable:Also (but not close at hand)
Beryl Bainbridge,
The Bottle Factory Outing
I have no idea why this is one of Feminista's
top 100 English-language books of the 20th century. It was good but not super.
It was also really disconcerting because it read like Woodhouse or Cold Comfort
Farm, as if it had been written in the '20s, so that references to "West
Side Story" and Elizabeth II and the oil crisis were disconcerting.
When I went to add it to my list of books I've read and mean to read, I found
that it was there before the feminista list. I don't remember why.
001231
D.H. Lawrence,
Sons and Lovers
I am not impressed. I can see why it'd be revolutionary in 1920, but it doesn't
carry over well.
001230
E.L. Konigsburg,
Throwing Shadows
Well-written stories to support her chosen theme
001230
Lois Lowry,
Rabble Starkey
Susan Creech she isn't.
001229
Lucy
Maude Montgomery, Anne of Windy Poplars and Anne's House of Dreams
You could tell LMM was getting sick of Anne. WP is nothing but Dickensian intrigue, written long after House of Dreams. Continuity suffers: two dogs named Carlo? For the aunts Chatty and Katy, Rebecca Dew, and Elizabeth Gray not to be invited to the wedding? House of Dreams is Dickensian intrigue as well but better done, fewer stories but longer.
The Code
Book
If Alison Weir counts, this was my third nonfiction book in less than a month. How unusual.
Lucy Maude Montgomery,
Anne of the Island
13 December 2000
Rumer Godden,
Impunity Jane
I had meant to read this ever since reading Look through My Window.
It is just as delightful as it ought to be.
11 December 2000
Helen Fielding,
Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason
When a tedious seatmate on your flight to Bangkok plies you with question and
his acquaintance is the last thing you want to make, surely, answering a question
about your hobbies "Napping" is the best possible way.
4 December 2000
Alison
Weir, The Life of Elizabeth I
Why does she have a problem footnoting direct quotes from primary sources?
4 December 2000
Lucy Maud Montgomery,
Anne of Avonlea
The kind of thing that I would have been better to read at a younger age. I
like Anne fine but would have more if I'd known about her earlier. Of course,
when I was younger I had no tolerance for girly books.
28 November 2000
J.M. Coetzee,
Disgrace
"Because there were too menny." I've always said Coetzee is a downer, though he is worthwhile, and for him to quote the worst line from Jude the Obscure, the most depressing book in English, just proves it.
Dava Sobel,
Longitude
Myra
Goldberg, Bee Season
Philip Pullman,
The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass
Rumer Godden,
Croyartie v. the God Shiva Acting through the Government of India
Beverly
Cleary, Otis Spofford
I started this with every intention of loving it but then I realized Otis is not original to this book but must be a character in another I haven't read, Ellen Tibbits. So I have to find Ellen before I can read Otis.
Beverly Cleary,
The Mouse and the Motorcycle, Runaway Ralph, Ralph S. Mouse
I'm not sure if I didn't read these when I was eight because I didn't like
motorcycles or because I thought to do so would be disloyal to Ramona. Or because
I noticed the Mouse and the Motorcycle after I read The Champion of
Merrimack County, which is about a mouse bicycle racer. Anyway, they're
delightful.
26-28 October 2000
Cynthia Voigt,
It's Not Easy Being Bad
The third in the Bad Girls series, as I had expected from the title--I've alerted Amazon to tell me whenever she has a new book out. In Bad, Badder, Baddest, Voigt erred (in my opinion) by setting anything outside school, whose limited purview served her so well in the first, Bad Girls. Voigt doesn't mollycoddle the seventh grade experience. She writes of girls who had liked Mikey and Margalo in earlier books, in fifth and sixth grades, now giving them half-smiles that shouldn't be returned--friends being, in seventh grade, not people you like but people to be seen with. How true that was, in my experience. I don't know how long she can write about Mikey and Margalo. They're older now, and she's developed their characters well without betraying who they were before, but she stopped the Tillerman cycle when Dicey was grown and stopped the Kingdom series when the two lines of Gwyn and Burl were rejoined, but that's not the sort of obstacle her bad girls face. How will they be bad in peculiarly eighth grade ways, and only in eighth grade? Or in eleventh grade ways, still staying in school? She has such a fine touch with characterization; I do love Dicey, Gran, Jeff, and Mina; Jackaroo, Griff (but not Oriel), and Elske; Margalo and Mikey. She stopped writing about Dicey maybe when she had grown older than her audience or maybe when her story was complete (with a marriage? Nah. I prefer to think the former, too old for the main audience). On the Wings of the Falcon stumbled on and on and on and agh I was glad Voigt redeemed herself in Elske but I'm also glad she's not going to prolong the Kingdom story anymore. Mikey and Margalo will be young enough for at least several more grades, but will Voigt be able to manage?
Any why, anyway, didn't Sons from Afar work? Neither A Solitary Blue nor Come a Stranger nor The Runner featured Dicey as any more than a supporting character either, and they worked. I expected what Voigt must have thought (did she? because she and I are likethis), that James and Sammy had enough character to have a book to themselves. However, Madeleine L'Engle couldn't make this theory work for Dennys and Sandy in Many Waters either. Just because one set of twins is interesting (Bran and Matthew in A Swiftly Tilting Planet) doesn't mean another pair is.
23 October 2000
A.S. Byatt,
The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life
When I first "read" them, I listened to them on audio tape. Biographer's
Tale is kicking my ass and I figured it would be well to habituate myself
to Byatt's narrative voice, which I particularly like in Still Life.
She intrudes all over the place, really obviously, talks about why she uses
this word instead of another and how she constructed that metaphor and what
the seminal image of the novel was--oooh, I said seminal, and that image was
of seedlings, see, I'm just like Byatt.
22 October 2000
A.S. Byatt,
The Biographer's Tale
Begun 30 September 2000
Go to previous or next season, Reading Index, Books, Words, or the Lisa Index.
Last modified 2 January 2001
Speak your mind: lisawherepenguindustdashcom
Copyright © 2001 LJH