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Wed Jul 12th, 2017
 | 09:54 pm - A Lack of Definition
Weather this warm induces a pleasant mental fog that reminds me of that 100 Demons summer story where Ritsu, drowsing in the heat, sees a visitor coming to the house looking for his grandfather, and recalls that she came ten years ago on a similar hot day. At that time Ritsu's grandfather put her off for a decade, and the story goes on in ways I forget. But at the end Ritsu realizes that even ten years ago his grandfather was already dead and couldn't have been nogotiating contracts with youkai or ghosts or whatever the woman is. Or couldn't except he's Ritsu's grandfather and does. But as in that story, if you start reading a book in this heat its reality slops out of the covers and takes over your own for a bit. Not a bad thing, depending on what your reality is like currently and what the reality that replaces it is.
Finished?
Burglars Can't be Choosers, which gave me the less pleasant kind of reading hangover. It faded fast enough, and just as well, because I have two more of this series waiting for me at the library.
Reading now?
The Kalevala, good winter-feeling fun, or at least Northland fun. Except when a note tells me that a bit was made up whole cloth by the Kalevala's compiler. Oh well. No reason why invention and addition to an oral tradition shouldn't continue into modern times, and not necessarily be deprecated just because *this* version is being written down.
The Complete Rivals of Sherlock Holmes
- turns out I've read vol 2 already, which is fine by me. A little of the Strand's second-stringers is enough at a time.
Atkinson, Kate, Case Histories
- the book I was reading when its reality took over mine. I really must start noting provenance. Someone said something about the book and I got it and then didn't want to read it because it sounded too formidable for a hot weather brain, but instead it turns out to be the prefect balance of plot and characterization. Not to be snobbish, but it's a lot less genre than its genre often is, which is also fine by me.
I mean, there are times one wants all the genre conventions because it's less work, but then that "there is no art, for there is nothing new" thing sets in, and we come easily to "easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting"-- whatever those words meant to Dr Johnson, because I don't think they meant then what they mean now.
And next?
Griffin, Kate, Kitty Peck and the music hall murders
-- hoping Griffin has learned something since her Stray Souls days.
Dunn, Carola, Superfluous women: a Daisy Dalrymple mystery
-- England in the late 1920s, which sounds good. Hope the author is English, because I started reading something recently (this last week, and that I've forgotten entirely what it was indicates the state of my mind in July) written by a Torontonian and set in England and all just enough off-key that I couldn't go on with it. And now I shall torture myself trying to remember what it was, because right now all the details of it are gone like a dream's.
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![[User Picture]](https://l-userpic.livejournal.com/11690011/1379663) | | From: |  mvrdrk |
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| Date: | July 15th, 2017 06:04 am (UTC) |
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Thanks for the reminder that those are really good summer reading! I'll have to go dig them out again. Ahh yess, I to recall your 100 demons posts, a touch of surreal with the real and lines blurring marvelously. ^_^ |
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