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landofnowhereThe theme of this week's reading is that if you're an extremely pretty teenage boy, the course of your life will be shaped by who you choose as a mentor -- or rather, who chooses you. Also, even in your thirties you'll still look like a pretty youth. (OK, fine, I can still pass for a college student, this is reasonable. But I have the occasional white hair, so I'm not worried about being unnaturally well-preserve.)
The Orphans of Raspay, by Lois McMaster Bujold. Yay, more Penric hijinks! Penric finds himself in some sticky situations, and hatches brilliant plans to get out of them, and somehow they never quite work, but everything works out in the end. Not the deepest of the series, but fun.
The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde. A was listening to The Fourth Bear on audiobook, which apparently contains Dorian Gray as a used-car dealer, and I realized that I'd never actually read the novel and maybe I should, so I did. Probably I should have read it as a teenager for maximum effect. I liked the first part of it, as an ambiguous fantasia on art and romance and sin, better than the ending, which was just pure horror. I feel bad for Sybil Vane, who deserved so much better (and for her Jewish manager, who deserved to not be a stereotype). I found the James Vane plot arc somewhat grimly amusing -- he wanted to be Laertes to his sister's Ophelia, but he's stuck in the the wrong story. The book is clearly a Work of Literature and part of the Great Literary Conversation with Shakespeare's sonnets, and Faust, and Plato, and so on and so forth, but I don't have much to say about that. Also it's slashy, as promised.
Next on the reading list is The Name of all Things by Jenn Lyons, the sequel to The Ruin of Kings, which also has a pretty teenage boy protagonist, so maybe I'll be keeping up the pattern.
The Orphans of Raspay, by Lois McMaster Bujold. Yay, more Penric hijinks! Penric finds himself in some sticky situations, and hatches brilliant plans to get out of them, and somehow they never quite work, but everything works out in the end. Not the deepest of the series, but fun.
The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde. A was listening to The Fourth Bear on audiobook, which apparently contains Dorian Gray as a used-car dealer, and I realized that I'd never actually read the novel and maybe I should, so I did. Probably I should have read it as a teenager for maximum effect. I liked the first part of it, as an ambiguous fantasia on art and romance and sin, better than the ending, which was just pure horror. I feel bad for Sybil Vane, who deserved so much better (and for her Jewish manager, who deserved to not be a stereotype). I found the James Vane plot arc somewhat grimly amusing -- he wanted to be Laertes to his sister's Ophelia, but he's stuck in the the wrong story. The book is clearly a Work of Literature and part of the Great Literary Conversation with Shakespeare's sonnets, and Faust, and Plato, and so on and so forth, but I don't have much to say about that. Also it's slashy, as promised.
Next on the reading list is The Name of all Things by Jenn Lyons, the sequel to The Ruin of Kings, which also has a pretty teenage boy protagonist, so maybe I'll be keeping up the pattern.