Reading roundup, including Mistborn (finally) and Werewolf Marines, Ulysses Pact #1

[hamsterwoman]

Happy Passover and happy Easter to all who celebrate! I need to make a real update (lots of things have been happening!) and answer comments and comment on people's entries, but for now, have a reading roundup, as I've been busy there, too:

Ulysses Pact: Commenced and currently at 10% (location 1092). It's actually not as hard going as I expected

Comments

[hamsterwoman]

I do think the first few chapters are the most engaging ones (it also picks up again at the end)

Hmm... I mean, it has been fairly engaging, but I'm not sure I'm prepared to be considerably less for the space of 500 pages or whatever...

and why it reminds me of reading Nabokov

Yeah, when I got to the hyperdescriptiveness, I figured that was the similarity with Nabokov you felt. It feels different to me, but something about the vividness of the everyday painted with language does feel similar. And it's aesthetic indulgence, probably, but very grounded in the physical world for both (I feel this more strongly with Nabokov in Russian than in English, though).

I remember reading the whole cat scene and thinking, "Yep, that is a cat. Cats were exactly the same a hundred years ago."

It is a really great description of a cat -- I found it very striking for that reason. Like, there's nothing amazing about a great cat description per se, maybe, but it almost reads like somebody describing everyday earth things to an alien who has no frame of reference, and one gets the feeling that an alien could actually get the emotional context at least pretty well. It's a neat trick!

(I'd love to see your list of quotes to compare, at some point :)

I think I'm now convinced of the rightness of the decision to go with a non-annotated version, because it's going OK for me -- I think it's probably the poetry-like reading again, where I don't so much care about the allusions and meaning I might be missing as long as the imagery and sounds are working for me. I think the annotations would just slow me down way too much for this to be fun, and after all fun is still sort of the point. (I'm also not feeling like I wished there were notes the way I did with Tristram Shandy, so.)