I'm currently about halfway through
Spirits in the Wires
by Charles de Lint, and I'm kind of "eh" about finishing it. I mean, I will finish reading it, but it just isn't holding my attention. I can't shake the feeling that he's telling the same story he's told before, but with a different selection of the Newford characters; it also feels like the entire book was "phoned in".
I'm starting to suspect I prefer his short fiction. The last novel of his I really really liked was
Someplace to be Flying,
and that's because I adore the Crow Girls.
Wordy McWord, Jilli. That's pretty much how I've felt about all of his stuff since Flying, too. I've stopped reading his new stuff, although I enjoyed rereading Moonheart a few years back.
Was Trader after Flying? I liked that one pretty much.
best part of moving? I just got my library card to our nearby fabulous library. The first book I checked out is "If I Were You," by Joan Aiken. I am enjoying it--anyone here read it?
Anybody else read "Girls' Poker Night"? More to the point, anybody read it and think "Dude, my last two weeks of livejournal are as good as this." Cause they are. Not that I don't like it. I do...just not a lot. The Bitches tell better stories...this is just random encounters and reminiscing, no cohesion. Like Ann Beattie, except for that microsecond in the 70s when she was cool. Are most women so tragically not funny that women writers who write chuckles make critics wet their pants? In the words of Charles Gunn, "Nuh and uh."
I read it erika - one of those I finished and wasn't sure why I bothered. It wsn't horrid ... just boreing. I only read it a month or two ago and don't remember it....
A couple places I laughed. But mostly, she gets to the end of her little tale and I'm like "And? We should care, why?" Because it all reminds me of the thoughts I have when I have insomnia, just written down as they happen...I'm thinking I should publish my lj, cause my friends are cooler anyway. I can put ita in, and Deb G, Tep, and Allyson(that's only a few of the interesting people I know, but these girl books have small crowds in them. And hey, diversity and fighting.)
That con happened in my home town so I remember it quite well. The local paper got a quote from Gaiman - he was quite amused by the whole thing, but pointed out that he was not the only one to have described such a scam in detail.
Scrappy,
If I Were You
is one of my favourite Aiken books. I love it because it reads like a combination of her Gothics with the Austen pastiches she also wrote. I think those who like
Brat Farrar
would also like it, it's another of the genre of "impostor becomes entwined in the life of a family" books.
I am going through books at an immense rate these days, having recovered my one-handed-reading-while-breastfeeding technique. I forgot how little else you do for the first few weeks. So far I've made my way through several junky paperbacks,
The Reader
, and two heavy volumes of nonfiction (a life of Cicero and a book on paleontology).
Dani, what do you think of The Reader? I really enjoyed it when I read it.
I adore If I Were You, and I don't think I've talked to more than one person before who'd even heard of it. It was the first of Aiken's romances I read, and I wasn't at all prepared for what she'd do to the conventions.
*beams at Scrappy and Dani, full of genial book-love*
