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Wednesday What Are You Reading
Oct. 15th, 2014 05:41 pmCurrently Reading
The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K. Le Guin) - which is a re-read. For a supposed classic, you would not believe how difficult it is to get hold of. I finally tracked it down in Gay's the Word. It's better than I remembered (which is not to say that I thought it was bad before; it just hadn't stuck well in my memory) - I am enjoying the gentle prose and the subtleties of the politics - but ouch, the male pronouns! I've changed as much as the world has - at the time I last read this I would still have been using male pronouns for God - but this would be a very different book if it were written today.
Recently Finished
Castle Gay and The House of the Four Winds (John Buchan) - also re-reads. Again, a couple of things that show that one never steps into the same book twice. I think I mentioned last week how interesting I found the by-election sub-plot, though it's not even a sub-plot, really, it's a background that occasionally intrudes into the plot. And the other thing is how I apparently last read THotFW before I did my A-levels, which seems hard to believe, but I would swear that I never picked up on the parallels with Germany before. Evallonia is Germany without Hitler and moved a bit southwards and eastwards - the youth movement, the war reparations. I would love to know what Buchan would have done with it after 1945.
The Bonfire of the Vanities (Tom Wolfe) - glorious, glorious trash, which unlike everything else on this week's post is exactly as I remembered.
Up Next
One of the delights I picked up in the course of my quest for The Left Hand of Darkness. Ancillary Sword (Ann Leckie). The Balloonists (L.T.C. Rolt). More Perfect Union (Alan Wilson). The Impossible Life of Mary Benson (which I read when it was called As Good as God, as Clever as the Devil).
The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K. Le Guin) - which is a re-read. For a supposed classic, you would not believe how difficult it is to get hold of. I finally tracked it down in Gay's the Word. It's better than I remembered (which is not to say that I thought it was bad before; it just hadn't stuck well in my memory) - I am enjoying the gentle prose and the subtleties of the politics - but ouch, the male pronouns! I've changed as much as the world has - at the time I last read this I would still have been using male pronouns for God - but this would be a very different book if it were written today.
Recently Finished
Castle Gay and The House of the Four Winds (John Buchan) - also re-reads. Again, a couple of things that show that one never steps into the same book twice. I think I mentioned last week how interesting I found the by-election sub-plot, though it's not even a sub-plot, really, it's a background that occasionally intrudes into the plot. And the other thing is how I apparently last read THotFW before I did my A-levels, which seems hard to believe, but I would swear that I never picked up on the parallels with Germany before. Evallonia is Germany without Hitler and moved a bit southwards and eastwards - the youth movement, the war reparations. I would love to know what Buchan would have done with it after 1945.
The Bonfire of the Vanities (Tom Wolfe) - glorious, glorious trash, which unlike everything else on this week's post is exactly as I remembered.
Up Next
One of the delights I picked up in the course of my quest for The Left Hand of Darkness. Ancillary Sword (Ann Leckie). The Balloonists (L.T.C. Rolt). More Perfect Union (Alan Wilson). The Impossible Life of Mary Benson (which I read when it was called As Good as God, as Clever as the Devil).
