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Wednesday reading meme
15 May 2019 10:15I'm going to try doing the "Wednesday reading meme" thing here: my previous attempts at booklogging here have run into the problem that I want to write whole essays about the books I've read, and never end up finishing them. So instead I'm setting a timer for 15 minutes and seeing how much I can say about my reading.
I read a lot in the last couple weeks, partly because I went to the library for my birthday, so I probably won't get through all this, but here goes!
Miranda in Milan, Katherine Duckett. A gothic f/f romance sequel to The Tempest. Didn't really engage with the things that I love about that play I'm Team Prospero even if he's problematic, and also I'm mostly there for the language, and these characters don't talk in anything resembling blank verse. Did remind me that I would love to see Cosette's ending in (the book) Les Miserables redone as a gothic (maybe this has been done, I don't know Les Mis fandom.)
Middlegame, Seanan McGuire. I really wanted to love this book: I'm a fan of most of McGuire's stuff, and this one promised math and language and chess and alchemy. But it just didn't really work for me -- there were some cool bits, but not enough cool bits to justify 600 pages. And a lot of the book was focused on the coming of age and telepathic-siblings-separated-at-birth relationship of the two main characters, who are savants/instantiations of the alchemical essences of math and language respectively. I found that readable, but not super compelling, and didn't enjoy the angst. The protagonists are almost exactly my age, which unfortunately made them less believable to me: I was hoping to identify with Dodger (the math savant), but didn't really. I'm not convinced she had to be that lonely/misunderstood as a math nerd growing up in Palo Alto! *And* at one point she makes a comment about how "Other female math grad students exist, but they are rare, and they have no sense of humor." Ouch! And that last bit is completely inaccurate in my experience (and the middle bit depends upon how you define "rare", and where you are).
Out of time -- I did read other books, some of them I even liked, but I have less to say about them. Depending upon how much reading I do this week I may catch up with them next week.
I read a lot in the last couple weeks, partly because I went to the library for my birthday, so I probably won't get through all this, but here goes!
Miranda in Milan, Katherine Duckett. A gothic f/f romance sequel to The Tempest. Didn't really engage with the things that I love about that play I'm Team Prospero even if he's problematic, and also I'm mostly there for the language, and these characters don't talk in anything resembling blank verse. Did remind me that I would love to see Cosette's ending in (the book) Les Miserables redone as a gothic (maybe this has been done, I don't know Les Mis fandom.)
Middlegame, Seanan McGuire. I really wanted to love this book: I'm a fan of most of McGuire's stuff, and this one promised math and language and chess and alchemy. But it just didn't really work for me -- there were some cool bits, but not enough cool bits to justify 600 pages. And a lot of the book was focused on the coming of age and telepathic-siblings-separated-at-birth relationship of the two main characters, who are savants/instantiations of the alchemical essences of math and language respectively. I found that readable, but not super compelling, and didn't enjoy the angst. The protagonists are almost exactly my age, which unfortunately made them less believable to me: I was hoping to identify with Dodger (the math savant), but didn't really. I'm not convinced she had to be that lonely/misunderstood as a math nerd growing up in Palo Alto! *And* at one point she makes a comment about how "Other female math grad students exist, but they are rare, and they have no sense of humor." Ouch! And that last bit is completely inaccurate in my experience (and the middle bit depends upon how you define "rare", and where you are).
Out of time -- I did read other books, some of them I even liked, but I have less to say about them. Depending upon how much reading I do this week I may catch up with them next week.