More books!
Following astarael_23 and others, I've been vaguely keeping track of my leisure reading this year. I've slowed down a fair bit over the last couple of months; here's everything I've read since the previous list.
Making Money - Terry Pratchett
Bad Science - Ben Goldacre
Changing Planes - Ursula Le Guin
The Rabbi's Cat - Joann Sfar. In the English-speaking world, if you want to write all-illustrated fiction, then the leading character must be a superhero, or at least must resemble one enough to fool the publishers (I have no idea why). In France, if you want to write a graphic novel about an Algerian rabbi and his talking cat, you just can. Cute.
Monday Begins On Saturday - Boris & Arkady Strugatsky. A story about a scientific research institute in the Soviet Union which conducts research into magic. There's quite a bit of satire in there (I think one of the characters is modelled on Lysenko) but it's definitely inferior to their more famous book, Roadside Picnic.
Belle de jour. Quite well-known in this country, this is culled from the weblog of a high-end female prostitute working in London. I found the narrator unlikable and the sex unerotic, and the general 'weblogginess' made for an uneven read. The narrator attempts to balance her work as a prostitute with her otherwise monogamous relationship, which could have been interesting if properly explored. Witty at times.
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown. I'd heard quite a lot of complaints about this book, mostly of the "he writes stuff that's blatantly not true" variety. I assumed that people who said this were referring to the various conspiracy theories which make up the bulk of the plot; this didn't strike me as particularly damning criticism, since if you're going to produce a convincing case for something which doesn't exist in the real world, then you're necessarily going to have to bend facts and sometimes just make stuff up. What I didn't realise was that Mr. Brown makes a whole wedge of basic factual errors which suggest that he hasn't ever set foot on the continent upon which the entire novel is set: in Dan Brown's Europe, Scottish houses have screen doors (I had to look up what those were), "England is the only country in Europe in which cars drive on the left" (two errors for the price of one!) and the Sorbonne grades degrees according to the American honours system. So that was a bit crap then.
Here are some books I'm stuck partway through:
Mr Palomar - Italo Calvino
Our Ancestors - Italo Calvino
Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov
Making Money - Terry Pratchett
Bad Science - Ben Goldacre
Changing Planes - Ursula Le Guin
The Rabbi's Cat - Joann Sfar. In the English-speaking world, if you want to write all-illustrated fiction, then the leading character must be a superhero, or at least must resemble one enough to fool the publishers (I have no idea why). In France, if you want to write a graphic novel about an Algerian rabbi and his talking cat, you just can. Cute.
Monday Begins On Saturday - Boris & Arkady Strugatsky. A story about a scientific research institute in the Soviet Union which conducts research into magic. There's quite a bit of satire in there (I think one of the characters is modelled on Lysenko) but it's definitely inferior to their more famous book, Roadside Picnic.
Belle de jour. Quite well-known in this country, this is culled from the weblog of a high-end female prostitute working in London. I found the narrator unlikable and the sex unerotic, and the general 'weblogginess' made for an uneven read. The narrator attempts to balance her work as a prostitute with her otherwise monogamous relationship, which could have been interesting if properly explored. Witty at times.
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown. I'd heard quite a lot of complaints about this book, mostly of the "he writes stuff that's blatantly not true" variety. I assumed that people who said this were referring to the various conspiracy theories which make up the bulk of the plot; this didn't strike me as particularly damning criticism, since if you're going to produce a convincing case for something which doesn't exist in the real world, then you're necessarily going to have to bend facts and sometimes just make stuff up. What I didn't realise was that Mr. Brown makes a whole wedge of basic factual errors which suggest that he hasn't ever set foot on the continent upon which the entire novel is set: in Dan Brown's Europe, Scottish houses have screen doors (I had to look up what those were), "England is the only country in Europe in which cars drive on the left" (two errors for the price of one!) and the Sorbonne grades degrees according to the American honours system. So that was a bit crap then.
Here are some books I'm stuck partway through:
Mr Palomar - Italo Calvino
Our Ancestors - Italo Calvino
Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov