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- Have read Blackout and All Clear. I can imagine the sort of criticism that might be leveled at them (FEWER EXAMPLES, CONNIE), but I don't agree with it (LOVE THE EXAMPLES, CONNIE.) Connie Willis can write as much logistics!porn as she likes and I will read it all. I totally did the "finish book and proceed immediately to reading it over again from the beginning" thing. There were a few timey-wimey things that I guessed ahead of time, but most I did not. And of course, in Connie Willis, the timey-wimey is mostly a means to an end.
- Have been reading more Austerity Britain which is my very favorite kind of history - lots of tasty primary sources stitched elegantly together.
- Finished The Night Watch by Sarah Waters. It's by far the least Gothic of her first four books (I haven't yet read the fifth), but ultimately it's the most depressing. Not quite Slammerkin depressing, but headed in that direction.
The Night Watch is told in three sections, moving back in time; first you meet all the characters in 1947, then in 1943, then in 1941. Usually (I'm thinking of Pinter and Sondheim) in backwards-moving narratives the ending/beginning is the most happy and hopeful, but here I found the romantic beginnings painful, knowing what was coming later, and just wanted to go to 1947 where everyone could move forward towards a new resolution. Also, Viv, who you meet in 1947 in the midst of a miserable affair with a married man, turns out to have gotten pregnant in 1943 by the same man. Who arranged for her to have an (illegal, of course) abortion, but who abandoned her when she hemorrhaged afterwards. And that... that I found absofuckinglutely unforgiveable. Seriously, I was all AND YOU'RE STILL WITH HIM FIVE YEARS LATER?
I was expecting the thrust of the book to be that the banality of peacetime life couldn't compare to the intensity and idealism and adrenaline-fueled excitement of wartime (which is my memory of David Hare's play Plenty, but it turned out, at least in my reading, to be so much the reverse that I could barely stand it. I would rather have had a whole book set in 1947.
- Am rereading Laurie R. King's With Child, the third Kate Martinelli novel, for what might be the first time since high school or college. It's a lot more depressing when the characters I once looked at as grown-ups are peers. Still, it's hard to put down, because King is really, really that good.
- I'm also doing a haphazard reread-all-of-Anne-Lamott project. Sadly, I think my copy of Traveling Mercies is not coming home, but I don't mind buying another. I've reread Bird by Bird and Operating Instructions and almost all of Grace (Eventually) and I've got Plan B by my bed.
- I'm also dipping in to The Year of the King again (Antony Sher's memoir of playing Richard III.) This time I'm really savoring all the physical backstage details of the Barbican, and remembering how much pleasure it gave me, when at drama camp, to mentally call the PA system that carried the show back to the dressing rooms "the tannoy." When I first read TYotK I was probably at the height of my want-to-be-an-actor-ness, and so reading it is nostalgic in a good way.
- On that theatrical note, for my birthday![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
breadandroses gave me Stephen Fry's new autobiography The Fry Chronicles, which picks up directly where Moab is my Washpot left off and covers the ensuing ten-ish years of his life. It was... honestly, it was a bit disappointing, primarily because it never quite settles down to being either a narrative of his emotional life or a chronology of his professional development, which means that it... well... it rather lurches. Partly (and laudably) this is due to the fact that many of the other figures in the narrative are famous in their own rights and he chooses not to go into much detail about his early experiences with them except to say, repeatedly and warmly, that Hugh and Emma (in particular) are absolutely spiffing and brilliant and lovely. Which WE ALL KNOW, thank you very much, Stephen, and would just like a tiny bit more of your POV on the whole Emma-trapping-you-in-the-hallway-while-she-ran-about-aggressively-naked situation. (I never dreamed, years ago, that Peter's Friends might in some ways be a LESS odd version of Stephen's Christmas parties.) Or, if you're not going to do that, which would be a very reasonable choice, maybe you could take us through the emotional experience of college with not quite so much time on the academic set-up? I mean, as a clueless American I'm grateful for the tutelage, particularly as to the differences between Cambridge and Oxford, but... well, the relationship with Kim, for example, is all a bit pat and Kim doesn't seem to have much personality. Which, again, is very courteous, but also frustrating.
- Have been reading more Austerity Britain which is my very favorite kind of history - lots of tasty primary sources stitched elegantly together.
- Finished The Night Watch by Sarah Waters. It's by far the least Gothic of her first four books (I haven't yet read the fifth), but ultimately it's the most depressing. Not quite Slammerkin depressing, but headed in that direction.
The Night Watch is told in three sections, moving back in time; first you meet all the characters in 1947, then in 1943, then in 1941. Usually (I'm thinking of Pinter and Sondheim) in backwards-moving narratives the ending/beginning is the most happy and hopeful, but here I found the romantic beginnings painful, knowing what was coming later, and just wanted to go to 1947 where everyone could move forward towards a new resolution. Also, Viv, who you meet in 1947 in the midst of a miserable affair with a married man, turns out to have gotten pregnant in 1943 by the same man. Who arranged for her to have an (illegal, of course) abortion, but who abandoned her when she hemorrhaged afterwards. And that... that I found absofuckinglutely unforgiveable. Seriously, I was all AND YOU'RE STILL WITH HIM FIVE YEARS LATER?
I was expecting the thrust of the book to be that the banality of peacetime life couldn't compare to the intensity and idealism and adrenaline-fueled excitement of wartime (which is my memory of David Hare's play Plenty, but it turned out, at least in my reading, to be so much the reverse that I could barely stand it. I would rather have had a whole book set in 1947.
- Am rereading Laurie R. King's With Child, the third Kate Martinelli novel, for what might be the first time since high school or college. It's a lot more depressing when the characters I once looked at as grown-ups are peers. Still, it's hard to put down, because King is really, really that good.
- I'm also doing a haphazard reread-all-of-Anne-Lamott project. Sadly, I think my copy of Traveling Mercies is not coming home, but I don't mind buying another. I've reread Bird by Bird and Operating Instructions and almost all of Grace (Eventually) and I've got Plan B by my bed.
- I'm also dipping in to The Year of the King again (Antony Sher's memoir of playing Richard III.) This time I'm really savoring all the physical backstage details of the Barbican, and remembering how much pleasure it gave me, when at drama camp, to mentally call the PA system that carried the show back to the dressing rooms "the tannoy." When I first read TYotK I was probably at the height of my want-to-be-an-actor-ness, and so reading it is nostalgic in a good way.
- On that theatrical note, for my birthday
breadandroses gave me Stephen Fry's new autobiography The Fry Chronicles, which picks up directly where Moab is my Washpot left off and covers the ensuing ten-ish years of his life. It was... honestly, it was a bit disappointing, primarily because it never quite settles down to being either a narrative of his emotional life or a chronology of his professional development, which means that it... well... it rather lurches. Partly (and laudably) this is due to the fact that many of the other figures in the narrative are famous in their own rights and he chooses not to go into much detail about his early experiences with them except to say, repeatedly and warmly, that Hugh and Emma (in particular) are absolutely spiffing and brilliant and lovely. Which WE ALL KNOW, thank you very much, Stephen, and would just like a tiny bit more of your POV on the whole Emma-trapping-you-in-the-hallway-while-she-ran-about-aggressively-naked situation. (I never dreamed, years ago, that Peter's Friends might in some ways be a LESS odd version of Stephen's Christmas parties.) Or, if you're not going to do that, which would be a very reasonable choice, maybe you could take us through the emotional experience of college with not quite so much time on the academic set-up? I mean, as a clueless American I'm grateful for the tutelage, particularly as to the differences between Cambridge and Oxford, but... well, the relationship with Kim, for example, is all a bit pat and Kim doesn't seem to have much personality. Which, again, is very courteous, but also frustrating.
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