July 2nd, 2007 - 7:55 am
» recent reading
I just finished listening to Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings, by Christopher Moore, and it was fantastic. Very fun, and this totally different take on fantasy — more magical realism, actually. I still really want to read Moore’s Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal, but alas my library doesn’t have that audiobook. I’m also a little disappointed to find that other titles at my library involving Fluke’s narrator, Bill Irwin, are almost exclusively Elmo dvds; Irwin’s a great narrator, but not that great.
Before that I spent a torturously long time getting through Philip Kerr’s The Shot, which I thought was going to be this cool CIA/Kennedy assassination fun action suspense thing, a little change of pace from my usual fare. But there’s apparently a reason I don’t gravitate toward that stuff — it was not my thing at all. It relied too heavily on sex and violence, and not in a good way. I just felt kind of squicked and/or offended listening to it. (And not in the way that Brett Easton Ellis’ Glamorama violence leaves you unsettled — Ellis really gets you thinking about it.) So thumbs down for that one for me. I actually had a snafu copying the discs over to my ipod and missed #10 out of 12 and was very glad when I discovered it, since I got to skip an hour’s listening at a point when I was very near to giving up. (I don’t like to give up on books; so far the only audiobooks I can remember abandoning are The Mermaid Chair and The Woodsman’s Daughter. Though god was Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury tough to get through.)
Next up? Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which I started yesterday. I love him. Love.
Stephie said: July 2nd, 2007 at 10:52 am
My roommate read The Gospel According to Biff, she said it was really awesome. And wow…scenes that were more squicky than Glamorama? Yipes.
rachel! said: July 2nd, 2007 at 11:42 am
No no. What I mean is there were scenes in The Shot that felt like violence for violence’s sake — it felt gratuitous, period. Whereas the gratuitous violence in Glamorama felt like it was that way for a reason. Kerr’s descriptions weren’t nearly as squicky as Ellis’s, but Ellis left you unsettled and *thinking*; Kerr just left me unsettled and wondering when it was going to end, and if it would get better before then (which it didn’t).