Tally Ho
Books read: Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë; House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski*; Julius by Daphne du Maurier; The Death of Felicity Taverner by Mary Butts and Wilderness Tips by Margaret Atwood. Pretty woeful haul for a whole two months. (I've been doing a lot of re-reading - mainly the Shirley Jackson novels and collections I'd only read once†: Come Along With Me and Raising Demons‡, and her child's history of the Salem Village trials. Sometimes I just want something I know I'll like.)
Books yet to read: A Little Night Music by Mary Jane Ward; The King's General by Daphne du Maurier; Lolly Willowes, or the Loving Huntsman by Sylvia Townsend Warner (on the recommendation of spiralsheep) and - to give my brain a rest - Different Seasons ('featuring "The Shawshank Redemption"', reads my movie tie-in edition) by Stephen King (on the randomly-remembered recommendation of, of all people, my English teacher when I was twelve). I get the feeling they'll all be a breeze.
Books I may as well admit I'll never finish: Woman On The Edge Of Time by Marge Piercy and Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. The first one's a dead cert.
Oh, well. Any recommendations for payday, while I'm tallying?
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* All the footnotes may have been a bad influence.
† I'd say something sweeping and book-snobby like 'only reading something once hardly counts as reading it at all', but then I would've retroactively-not-read an awful lot of Highly Dull High Literature, and would lose out on the only enjoyment I ever get from the things - namely, bragging - on a technicality.
‡ There's a thick vein of nostalgia running through Raising Demons that keeps making me go all unexpectedly mooshy - not least in the famous 'clothespin dolls' segment, where this innocuous snippet as Our Heroine goes through her childhood junk makes me, for some reason, almost tear up:
'How could I have forgotten Violet Manning, who wrote on a purple page, "Oh my friend, our days will soon end, don't forget, your friend Violet"?'
I don't know why.
(The funny bits, of course, make me nearly tear up, too. I'll have to post the 'faculty wives' essay at some point.)
Books yet to read: A Little Night Music by Mary Jane Ward; The King's General by Daphne du Maurier; Lolly Willowes, or the Loving Huntsman by Sylvia Townsend Warner (on the recommendation of spiralsheep) and - to give my brain a rest - Different Seasons ('featuring "The Shawshank Redemption"', reads my movie tie-in edition) by Stephen King (on the randomly-remembered recommendation of, of all people, my English teacher when I was twelve). I get the feeling they'll all be a breeze.
Books I may as well admit I'll never finish: Woman On The Edge Of Time by Marge Piercy and Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. The first one's a dead cert.
Oh, well. Any recommendations for payday, while I'm tallying?
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
* All the footnotes may have been a bad influence.
† I'd say something sweeping and book-snobby like 'only reading something once hardly counts as reading it at all', but then I would've retroactively-not-read an awful lot of Highly Dull High Literature, and would lose out on the only enjoyment I ever get from the things - namely, bragging - on a technicality.
‡ There's a thick vein of nostalgia running through Raising Demons that keeps making me go all unexpectedly mooshy - not least in the famous 'clothespin dolls' segment, where this innocuous snippet as Our Heroine goes through her childhood junk makes me, for some reason, almost tear up:
'How could I have forgotten Violet Manning, who wrote on a purple page, "Oh my friend, our days will soon end, don't forget, your friend Violet"?'
I don't know why.
(The funny bits, of course, make me nearly tear up, too. I'll have to post the 'faculty wives' essay at some point.)