The Agency: A Spy in the House, which has been on my shelves, a third read, since July. Finished it off last night, skimming and skipping, because I refuse to let a YA book consume several more days on top of the ones it swallowed last summer.
White is for Witching. Oyeyemi writes the kind of book that simple-minded readers like me can't read properly. She's a marvellous writer but I can't follow what she's doing. This may be because of what I normally read. Someone reviewing this said, essentially, 'If you loved We Have Always Lived in the Castle, this is for you.' Well, I did and it wasn't. Castle is a genre book; it does its genre task very neatly indeed and solves the riddle so that even the dumbest ox knows what happens. Witching is not genre, so even though there's a House, with Things in it, ummm-- there's no guarantee that actually there *is* a House rather than a house, or Things inside it; or if there are, there's no saying what the Things are. Thus literature.
What are you currently reading?
Red, still. May still be reading *that* next July.
The Plum Rain Scroll by Ruth Manley. Children's book about a mythical Japan. Discovered down in the cellar in a box of books from the 80s (put there in '96) which I never read (unlike the others, which I can't remember reading.) Has kitsune and oni and such-like, and might prove interesting, though the style so far is aiding my endeavours to learn to skim.
I was down in the cellar from a vague memory of seeing The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales in a box somewhere. That somewhere was indeed the basement, and both books have a distinct mildewy smell to them. (The 80s books, including my vanished Ishiguros, do not, fortunately.) Following
petronia's advice, I started reading 'Tuor and Gondolin' last night but the smell, even more than the prose style, is a distinct deterrent. Web advises leaving books in the sun, which I shall do when we get some sun, or putting them in a box inside another box filled with baking soda, which no I don't think so, or disguising smell by interleaving every ten pages with scented shelf liner, which I could do because I discovered some Front Lawn Dollar Store shelf liner down in the bunker a week ago that I'm damned if I will use in my drawers. Or I could buy a new copy.
Or I could forget reading Tolkien.
Real World by Natsuo Kirino. Another refuse to be defeated book; started last October, can't get anywhere with, *will* finish dammit. Part of my 'Clean all the
What will you read next?
*If* I ever finish any of the above, shall console myself with a random Jim Butcher.
'Clean all the shelves!' or 'Empty the kitchen table!' are merely artificial ways of ordering my reading. I could as easily do the book challenge I came across in someone's blog yesterday (a day off, finally, my first non-public holiday holiday since October: amazing how not working two hours at the daycare expands a day to infinity): 26 books, one for each letter of the alphabet. Authors' names, to get round the oddities like x.
