nekkid
There's something about the process of choosing books for book club which leaves me floundering and slightly shattered. This morning's particular experience may have been partially due to the dual effects of the curiously disorienting and space-warping navigational challenges of the Waterfront mall (memo to self: stick to the familiar entrance in future, even if it's twelve miles and a seething sea of schoolkids away from the end you want to visit), and this morning's thundering headache. Whatever it is, put me in front of a general fiction shelf and ask me to choose ten books for an eclectic audience of 6 other women, some of whom I don't know all that well, and my brain seizes solid while I whimper gently and attract concerned glances from even the psychotic misanthropes who staff Exclusive. Drool may also be involved.
Part of the problem is that I actually don't read that widely outside sf/fantasy, which is Bad and Wicked, if not downright Evil, in a self-respecting English academic (not that I currently am, actually); in a spirit of self-broadening I ration myself to one sf and one fantasy, plus one crime novel. The other seven choices are wide open. A weird sort of effect kicks in where I know that I should be all Serious and Academic, but know I'm not really, but expect the other book club members to expect me to be anyway, so I try to ratchet the Literary quotient up and down simultaneously, ending up in a sort of mental self-arm-lock, and drool.
Choosing books is actually horribly personal, and makes me feel very exposed, and my so-called academic identity really only makes it worse. I console myself with the thought that today, at any rate, at least some of the choices were essentially random, on account of how the headache was preventing me from seeing straight, and I probably chose a couple of things that were two to the left of where I was actually aiming.
Scored Banks's Algebraist, though, and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, so it can't be all bad.
Part of the problem is that I actually don't read that widely outside sf/fantasy, which is Bad and Wicked, if not downright Evil, in a self-respecting English academic (not that I currently am, actually); in a spirit of self-broadening I ration myself to one sf and one fantasy, plus one crime novel. The other seven choices are wide open. A weird sort of effect kicks in where I know that I should be all Serious and Academic, but know I'm not really, but expect the other book club members to expect me to be anyway, so I try to ratchet the Literary quotient up and down simultaneously, ending up in a sort of mental self-arm-lock, and drool.
Choosing books is actually horribly personal, and makes me feel very exposed, and my so-called academic identity really only makes it worse. I console myself with the thought that today, at any rate, at least some of the choices were essentially random, on account of how the headache was preventing me from seeing straight, and I probably chose a couple of things that were two to the left of where I was actually aiming.
Scored Banks's Algebraist, though, and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, so it can't be all bad.