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landofnowhereSome quicker reads this week!
Shadow and Bone, Leigh Bardugo. That was a perfectly pleasant YA fantasy that kept me up a bit past my usual bedtime. Will probably watch the upcoming Netflix series.
An Ideal Husband, Oscar Wilde. Another Discord dramatic reading -- this one I knew very little about coming in, turns out to be mostly entertaining Oscar Wilde hijinks, with political blackmail about canals, and had us all rooting for an OT3, though the ending goes rather jarringly patriarchal.
Parnassus on Wheels, Christopher Morley. Recommended by Ask a Manager. Prior to this all I knew about Christopher Morley was that his father proved Morley's theorem in Euclidean geometry, but this book turned out to be a delightful treat and exactly my thing! It's a romance novella written in 1917 about a horse-drawn bookmobile. Helen, the protagonist, fed up with housekeeping for her brother while he writes books about the joys of country life, the bookmobile off of a traveling book salesman and runs off. It is a romance: the front matter tells you that she ends up marrying the salesman, but there's some good book talk and escapades before that, and Helen is a delightful narrator.
The Haunted Bookshop, Christopher Morley. Sequel to Parnassus on Wheels, but suffers from not having replaced Helen as narrator with an omniscient narrator who will tell you about gender essentialism and is far more interested in showing you people bloviating about books. However, this does may the book much more quotable. (Helen is present in this book, and seems happy with her married bookselling life -- the book does make in clear that unlike her brother, her husband is able to housekeep for himself when she's away -- but plays a background supporting role.)
Pretty early in this book it becomes clear that Morley idolizes George Gissing, and that what he's trying to do with these books is write a George Gissing novel, only less crushingly depressing. And the bits where he's trying to do that are pretty good -- I liked the half-chapter which was the booksellers' club meeting (and would read more about the bookseller from the poor Jewish neighborhood who comments that the people in his area only buy the good books -- only rich people can afford to buy bad books). But there's also a dim-witted young new protagonist ("he had gone to an excellent college where glee clubs and theatricals had left him little time for reading") who succeeds in solving the mystery (which is not as exciting as the title "The Haunted Bookshop" makes it sound) and getting the girl because that's the way this sort of story goes.
(Also the dog in these books gets rather a rough time of it, particularly at the end of the second book -- this will probably be more bothersome to those people who care about dogs -- it took me a a while in the first book to figure out that Bock was a dog and not another horse...)
Shadow and Bone, Leigh Bardugo. That was a perfectly pleasant YA fantasy that kept me up a bit past my usual bedtime. Will probably watch the upcoming Netflix series.
An Ideal Husband, Oscar Wilde. Another Discord dramatic reading -- this one I knew very little about coming in, turns out to be mostly entertaining Oscar Wilde hijinks, with political blackmail about canals, and had us all rooting for an OT3, though the ending goes rather jarringly patriarchal.
Parnassus on Wheels, Christopher Morley. Recommended by Ask a Manager. Prior to this all I knew about Christopher Morley was that his father proved Morley's theorem in Euclidean geometry, but this book turned out to be a delightful treat and exactly my thing! It's a romance novella written in 1917 about a horse-drawn bookmobile. Helen, the protagonist, fed up with housekeeping for her brother while he writes books about the joys of country life, the bookmobile off of a traveling book salesman and runs off. It is a romance: the front matter tells you that she ends up marrying the salesman, but there's some good book talk and escapades before that, and Helen is a delightful narrator.
The Haunted Bookshop, Christopher Morley. Sequel to Parnassus on Wheels, but suffers from not having replaced Helen as narrator with an omniscient narrator who will tell you about gender essentialism and is far more interested in showing you people bloviating about books. However, this does may the book much more quotable. (Helen is present in this book, and seems happy with her married bookselling life -- the book does make in clear that unlike her brother, her husband is able to housekeep for himself when she's away -- but plays a background supporting role.)
Pretty early in this book it becomes clear that Morley idolizes George Gissing, and that what he's trying to do with these books is write a George Gissing novel, only less crushingly depressing. And the bits where he's trying to do that are pretty good -- I liked the half-chapter which was the booksellers' club meeting (and would read more about the bookseller from the poor Jewish neighborhood who comments that the people in his area only buy the good books -- only rich people can afford to buy bad books). But there's also a dim-witted young new protagonist ("he had gone to an excellent college where glee clubs and theatricals had left him little time for reading") who succeeds in solving the mystery (which is not as exciting as the title "The Haunted Bookshop" makes it sound) and getting the girl because that's the way this sort of story goes.
(Also the dog in these books gets rather a rough time of it, particularly at the end of the second book -- this will probably be more bothersome to those people who care about dogs -- it took me a a while in the first book to figure out that Bock was a dog and not another horse...)