Wednesday Reading
Dec. 5th, 2013 01:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quarter_to_fiveHanukkah is over! Glory be. I don't have anything against the holiday, per se, except that it's the only one my family makes even the slightest pretense of celebrating. We love to eat on Yom Kippur and have pork on passover. But for some reason, we go through with the candle lighting business, all eight days of it. It's not a bad tradition, but given that I don't believe in god and cannot, for the life of me, sing, trying to hum the prayer and light the thing for four nights (my sister gets the other four, mercifully) becomes increasingly awkward. It's always outworn it's welcome by the time it's done.
Yeah, yeah, I have no soul.
The only book I finished this week was JK Rowling/Robert Galbraith's The Cuckoo's Calling. I really enjoyed it but hardly have anything to say about it. It's not nearly as, well, mean as The Casual Vacancy. I really expected that sometimes savage eye Rowling has for character's weaknesses and pretensions to be at it's sharpest when writing about a world of rich starlets, rappers and fashion designers, but it's surprising restrained. (I admit i'm disappointed.) Cormoran Strike, our hero, is a fairly fun presence. Well, not fun, but neither tedious nor precious. He's very good at his job and has a decidedly cool backstory, but he's not fluffy or polished. He has his pretensions and his vanities, and enough going on in his life - a vastly complicated family, a bright-eyed new assistant, a dramatic ex-girlfriend - that will all surely reappear to good effect in any sequel. The mystery was pretty good too.
Actually, I also read The Princess and the Queen, by George RR Martin. It's a prequel novella thing to ASOIAF (not Dunk & Egg, even earlier,) and is written like a - very dramatic - history rather than prose. It's not terribly satisfying as a story, but it's as epic as anything I've ever read. It's probably not going to go into my canon of favorite GRRM stuff, but it's got this sweep, this brutal sense of glory and tragedy that GRRM sometimes deconstructs so well, and sometimes just goes all in with. I liked it despite myself, in short.
Yeah, yeah, I have no soul.
The only book I finished this week was JK Rowling/Robert Galbraith's The Cuckoo's Calling. I really enjoyed it but hardly have anything to say about it. It's not nearly as, well, mean as The Casual Vacancy. I really expected that sometimes savage eye Rowling has for character's weaknesses and pretensions to be at it's sharpest when writing about a world of rich starlets, rappers and fashion designers, but it's surprising restrained. (I admit i'm disappointed.) Cormoran Strike, our hero, is a fairly fun presence. Well, not fun, but neither tedious nor precious. He's very good at his job and has a decidedly cool backstory, but he's not fluffy or polished. He has his pretensions and his vanities, and enough going on in his life - a vastly complicated family, a bright-eyed new assistant, a dramatic ex-girlfriend - that will all surely reappear to good effect in any sequel. The mystery was pretty good too.
Actually, I also read The Princess and the Queen, by George RR Martin. It's a prequel novella thing to ASOIAF (not Dunk & Egg, even earlier,) and is written like a - very dramatic - history rather than prose. It's not terribly satisfying as a story, but it's as epic as anything I've ever read. It's probably not going to go into my canon of favorite GRRM stuff, but it's got this sweep, this brutal sense of glory and tragedy that GRRM sometimes deconstructs so well, and sometimes just goes all in with. I liked it despite myself, in short.
