evelyn_b

Buying Books From A Distance

I don't need to break my "no current events" rule for you to guess that there's been some disruption in my usual work schedule. Right now I have almost all the time in the world, but shockingly little focus. Or maybe not so shockingly! Anyway, Wednesday posting may or may not improve eventually.

My already-read books were piling up at home, so I asked one of my favorite used bookstores if I could donate a small box by mail - and I could! This doesn't completely solve the problem, but it's much reduced. I also sent some money and, since serendipity is most of the fun of going to a used bookstore, I asked if they could pick out a couple of books to send back to me - and they said yes! So we'll see what I get in a week or two.

What I've Finished Reading

The Sea of Monsters, The Titan's Curse, and The Battle of the Labyrinth, all by Rick Riordan and all delightful dad-joke extravaganzas starring Percy Jackson, neglected son of the sea god and basically good kid. DON'T ASK because you certainly won't get a satisfying explanation for why the Labyrinth, Mount Olympus, Calypso's island, and the gates of Tartarus all picked up and moved to the USA; it's enough to know that Rick Riordan is an American and loves road trips. I got highly invested in the young satyr Grover Underwood's quest to find the great god Pan and restore the spirit of the Wild to the modern world. Other than that, my favorite character is Clarisse, a tough, buff, cartoonishly bullying teenage daughter of Ares, who expends far too much energy trying to impress her asshole dad.

I've also been re-reading some Terry Pratchetts! Guards! Guards! isn't quite as good as I remembered it, but good enough. And some other things; allegedly I'll catch up on posting about them sometime.

What I'm Reading Now

Sometimes I love Don Quixote and sometimes I am so bored by Don Quixote that my eyes glaze over. For example, I'm always happy when Quixote interrupts people to defend the obvious merits and historical truthfulness of chivalric romances, but not so thrilled whenever a bunch of non-Don Quixote guys get together and tell their romantic stories to a captive audience. I'm sure that there are lots of excellent critical essays to be written about why this is interesting, but they will not be written by me.

Now it's just occured to me that LM Montgomery loves doing this, too - having different minor characters butt in to unburden themselves of half a short story she wrote for a quick $10 fifteen years ago - and I was annoyed by it as a child but reconciled to it later, so maybe I'll turn a corner on Cervantes' swain brigade in another thirty years.

Independent People by Halldor Laxness is a so-far unexpectedly funny book about bleak agricultural life in early 20th century Iceland. Bjartur is a fiercely independent sheep farmer who lives in a sod house on land that is rumored to be haunted by devils or ghosts, but is probably just haunted by isolation and dung smoke. I'm only about a sixth of the way in, and his wife has already died in childbirth while he was out hunting for a lost sheep (that she'd actually just butchered and eaten in secret because she was craving meat and he wouldn't get her any, but she didn't feel she could tell him that because he's kind of a dick). He trips over her corpse on his way back in because the sod house is that small and dark. It's just that kind of book! I always think I have an aversion to bleakness and only want to read cheerful books full of comfortable beauty and friendly satire and nice people who support each other, but then as soon as anyone puts some brutally indifferent nature and slightly inchoate macho assholes in front of me, I drink it all the way up like it's the coldest beer of the summer and I've been crossing a parking lot for two hours.

It's all in the writing, I guess. Laxness (and/or his translator, J.A. Thompson) is so good at showing us a character in a few paragraphs, then summing them up neatly in a single detail. Shortly after we meet Bjartur, we feel like we've known him for years, because of this knowing line:

"There's no need to be stingy with that muck," he said of the sugar, for he always spoke slightingly of sweet things.

Later, a querulous, bigoted old minister gets stitched into this perfect change purse of petulance: "It was equally painful to him to hear anyone spoken ill of as to hear them praised."

Ok, these obviously aren't going to have the full effect unless you read them in context, but I promise you they are good. Yet another book I'm sorry I put off reading for so long!

What I Plan to Read Next

I'm just about to start Hogfather (another Pratchett reread) and a new detective book called IQ by Joe Ide. Also The Last Olympian, coincidentally also the last book in the Percy Jackson series.

What I've Finished Reading

I didn't spend all of The Mansion in a Mink-induced panic because once Mink is tucked away in Parchman, the book goes meandering along down non-Mink trails that are sometimes interesting in their own right and sometimes not. There's a kind of tepid convoluted love story and a character - Flem's daughter, who went away East and lost her hearing in the Spanish Civil War - who should be a fascinating character but isn't - and I don't know if it's because Faulkner is shy about doing his brambly interiority thing on female characters or if he just didn't feel at home with this particular one.

We come back to Mink at the end, of course. Cousin Flem, "a son of a bitch's son of a bitch," has done all he could to stop Mink coming back to Jefferson, but you can't stop a man who's got nothing to lose. Then a truckload of symbolic baggage is unloaded directly onto our grateful heads, as we always knew it would be. Immediately after I closed the last page, all the minor irritants and confusions of the long non-Mink middle section evaporated. Even the sense that I didn't fully understand the context, though factually true (this is the last book in a trilogy, it turns out) dried up and blew away. The irritants etc. came trickling back later, but it took a while.

On Sunday I had some spare time so I went to the nearest bookstore, had a very expensive and mediocre coffee drink, and read all of Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett. I didn't mean to read it all. I meant to read about 75 pages and leave the rest for another day, but there were no chapter breaks and one thing led to another.

My greatest disappointment was that even though Pratchett dedicates the book to the many readers who sent in new verses of The Hedgehog Song, no new verses of The Hedgehog Song appear in Witches Abroad. This hardly seems right.

What I'm Reading Now

Way back in the early days of this record, I read a book called Boswell's Presumptuous Task, the totally engaging biography of a man who set out to write the world's best biography and succeeded, while failing at every single other thing. What I've finally just started reading now is the biography he wrote, The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell. It's ENORMOUS and as of page 60 or so I am not disappointed at all. Samuel Johnson was a well-known Tory writer and entertaining grump in his fifties when the young Boswell attached himself to him like a hapless clap-ridden baby sloth to a Bigfoot, or, if you prefer, like Plato to Socrates. He spent the rest of Johnson's life writing down everything Johnson ever said or did on the bold assumption that posterity would appreciate it. I can't speak for the rest of us, but as far as I'm concerned he was right. More on this later.

Also later: B for Burglar, Too Many Cooks, Inspector Cadaver, and maybe the new issue of Poetry; I'm still behind on everything.

What Interlibrary Loan Hasn't Found For Me Yet

I'm still waiting for Goldfinger by Ian Fleming! Come on, interlibraries, bring me my spy pulp so I can cross it off the 99 Novels list!

What I’ve Finished Reading

Making Money was ok! It relies heavily on two of my least favorite Pratchett running jokes/worldbuilding elements – the Igors and the Fool’s Guild – but when I say “least favorite,” I don’t mean I’m running around loathing them, just that if I had to rank all the things in Pratchett they’d end up near the bottom. I guessed Mr. Bent’s painful secret only a little ahead of the cast of characters, which was probably about when I was meant to. Moist is threatened with a blackmailer who knows all about his other life, but deals with it admirably; there are lots of cameos from our old friends on the Watch, a smattering of necromancy post-mortem communication, and a very brief appearance by my favorite minor character, C. M. O. T. Dibbler – who doesn’t actually do much here, and in fact doesn’t even offer to cut his own throat, but all the same a pleasure to see you, Throat. Same with our even older friend Death, who appears briefly. Not nearly as good as Wyrd Sisters or Feet of Clay but still enjoyable. I’ll have to find and read the earlier book about Moist von Lipwig, Going Postal.

I also finished a book called The Best of Judith Merril, a collection of sci-fi short stories (and two poems) from about 1940-1970. I thought some of the stories were interesting and some were a bit bad, but since the book fell apart in my hands while I was visiting family and I didn’t feel enough attachment to it to take it home in that state, I gave it to my sister to light the wood stove with.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve been meaning to read My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell for a long time. I didn’t find My Family and Other Animals at the new used bookstore the other day, but I did find Birds, Beasts, and Relatives, which is a sequel and probably just as good. Gerald Durrell is the younger brother of Lawrence “Larry” Durrell, author of The Alexandria Quartet and one of my very favorite nemeses. As writers, they have in common a gift for extremely vivid sensory description bordering on the hallucinatory. Gerry’s adventures collecting animal specimens on his sunny Greek island are always good reading, though his depiction of the smell of turtle dissection, for example, was a little too real. The “relatives” side of things is a little less satisfactory. Gerry’s family members have about one trait each: Leslie likes to shoot things, Larry’s eccentric friends eat all the food, Margo has acne and is unhappy about it. Poor Margo gets the shortest end of this already short stick; even in her own chapter she is upstaged by everyone else. But that’s not necessarily much of a flaw; this is a light-hearted book about people and a lovingly detailed one about the natural life of Corfu, and it works pretty well most of the time.

Along with osprey_archer, I’ve also started reading The Three Musketeers! by Alexandre Dumas! I have to say, this one hasn’t grabbed me by the lapels, danced me around the living room, and flung my heart into the heaving ocean with as much dispatch as The Count of Monte Cristo - but this will be the last time I compare it to The Count of Monte Cristo, since that’s not a fair comparison for anyone.

( Some Musketeers )
I’m still having a hard time parsing the political situation, but I’m not sure how relevant it’s going to be yet. I might give up and just read a Wikipedia summary of the reign of Louis XIII or something - but maybe I'll just relax and enjoy these ridiculous murderbros enjoying their impossible youth.

What I Plan to Read Next

More catching up is ahead! Eventually I’m going to read Sign of the Unicorn by R. Zelazny. We’ll see what else.

Archived from Livejournal

What I've Finished Reading

Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett:

Granny had never had much time for words. They were insubstantial. Now she wished that she had found the time. Words were indeed insubstantial. They were as soft as water, but they were also as powerful as water and now they were rushing over the audience, eroding the levees of veracity, and carrying away the past.

That's us down there, she thought. Everyone knows who we really are, but the things down there are what they'll remember - three gibbering old baggages in pointy hats. All we've ever done, all we've ever been, won't exist anymore.

So Terry Pratchett just keeps getting better. Wyrd Sisters is a hilarious and affectionate parody of all things Shakespeare and a pointed meditation on the Ethics of Tudor Propaganda (and magic, and fiction as a species of magic), interrupted at intervals by Nanny Ogg singing an off-color song about the superior natural defenses of the hedgehog. It also might be Pratchett's most successfully character-driven comedy yet? I don't know; that's hard to judge. But the interplay among the three witches, and their genuine friction and friendship with each other, is a potentially inexhaustible well of enjoyment. I wish Wyrd Sisters were a sitcom, or a podcast, so that I could listen to three episodes a day for the rest of my life. Personally, I could have done with fewer jokes about how flat-chested Magrat is, but there's enough here to more than make up for it. There is also a memorable cameo by DEATH, as himself, suffering a rare bout of stage fright. It's always a pleasure to see you again, Death, even under circumstances as meta as these <3. Pratchett has all the chops he needs to pull of the Shakespeare parody: critical, lyrical, and bawdy. This is one of those books that make me fleetingly angry with myself for not reading them twenty years ago, just because I can see what a good friend they would have been to me during that time. But you know how time is. I read it now instead, and that has to be good enough.

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi ( is an ambitious novel )

The Old Man and the Sea ( is exactly what it says on the tin. )

What I'm Reading Now

The True Actor by Jacinto Lucas Pires. Out-of-work actor Americo Abril receives an offer to star in a self-referential art film, and almost as soon as he accepts, a self-referential art film swells up around him and swallows his real (?) life. I spent the first four chapters prickling with impatience at Americo Abril's dull detachment from everyone and everything (and his adultery and low-level alienation from his wife, always a hard sell to start with) but the stranger things get for Americo, the more willing I am to keep reading. I still wish I could like him a little more, though it's not the kind of book where liking the guy is the point. There's probably a little bit of translation syndrome at work here; you get the impression that a lot of these sentences were funnier or livelier in Portuguese.

I'm not supposed to like Henry Mulhaney in The Groves of Academe, either, but somehow it matters in The True Actor and doesn't matter in the least, or is an active good, in Groves. Mulhaney is a beautifully unattractive literature professor who turns a perfectly ordinary non-renewal of his contract into a moral crusade with just a few simple lies. That the brisk ink caricature of a tiny "progressive" college is so instantly familiar to me is all the funnier given that this book came out in 1952 and I didn't start college until the 1990s. An existential question emerges: Is it even possible to write a novel about academia without resorting to caricature? Is academia just a natural caricaturizing process? Anyway, things are off to a promising start here.

What I Plan to Read Next

Witches Abroad or Night Watch -- which one should it be, Pratchett fans? Next up in 99 Novels is Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor. Next on my own shelves: well, that depends on which shelf we're on.

Archived from Livejournal

What I've Finished Reading

The Dark Lantern by Henry Williamson.

( They fuck you up, your mum and dad )

Also in 99 Novels: Invisible Man. We're up to 1952! I started this on Friday evening, thinking I would just read a chapter or two and then get some work done, but hahahahahahaNOPE. Some books come into our lives to be half-read, and some to completely usurp our plans for the next twelve hours. Guess which kind this is? It's a gorgeous nightmare, twentieth-century America as painted by Hieronymus Bosch, and I couldn't put it down even when I wanted to.

What I'm Reading Now

I'm about halfway through The Fifth Elephant and regretting, for no really clear reason, that I've abandoned publication order; I might double back and read the previous book, Jingo, before I finish. Vimes has been sent on a diplomatic mission to Comedy Transylvania, Gaspode the talking dog tries to help Carrot with his relationship problems, and Sgt. Colon has been temporarily promoted, to the detriment of everyone and everything.

Foundation's Edge is surprisingly good! Well, it's Asimovian, and Asimov is pretty unfailing comfort food for me, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised. For some reason, I can suspend my disbelief about a galaxy-wide empire lasting twelve thousand years – I mean, my sense of scale is not too robust at the best of times – but not about space archaeologists who think it's weird for a planet to have more than two languages. Come on!

What I Plan to Read Next

Probably taking a break from the 99 for a week, but with what? More Asimov? BALZAC? Books published within the past ten years? And then it's time to read The Groves of Academe and The Old Man and the Sea!

This post is archived from Livejournal and contains images I haven't been able to figure out how to post here yet. I'll come back and put them in one of these days.

What I Bought on My Trip

I am very excited about this item:

( Every day is a mystery )

For those of you unable to view images, or in case I am bad at taking pictures, this is a bundle of books in brown paper, with the label "Six Mystery Paperback Novels, No Duplicates, $2.00" I couldn't resist the opportunity to be surprised, for only two dollars; it's a major victory of willpower that I only bought one of these.

Here's the beautiful first book in the stack:

[a beautiful image you can't yet see]

I love this cover! Who is this gigantic man walking away from the corpse chair? I hope it's our detective. So far, no one has died; we've just had a bitter Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf-esque conversation between a young prematurely estranged married couple at one of those deceptively bucolic little colleges with rotten swarming hearts. Well, academia will do that to you, if it doesn't just stab you in the neck straight off. Stay safe!

What I Didn't Buy But Am Reading Anyway

I can't exactly say that I like The Keeper of Lost Causes, but I'm still reading it, so make of that what you will. The grisly details of the fictional politician's bizarre torture and captivity are not really my favorite form of entertainment, and Carl Mørck, Allegedly Great Detective, is never going to get on my good side if he can't be bothered to read the report of the case he's supposed to be working on. I'm terribly sad that you have PTSD and your wife is a bitch, Mørck! My eyes are brimming with tears of sympathy! But if you aren't going to do your job, you should probably find a different one, maybe something low-key with no murders and no kidnapped women who are depending on your task force to get them un-kidnapped somehow.

The translation, or possibly the original prose, continues to be clumsy, but the chapters are short and go by quickly, and there's enough suspense to keep me turning pages. Probably that means it's at least ok? I won't know until I've finished it. I am enjoying all the Danish place names, which are obviously being made to carry a lot of meaning and imagery in the text but for which I have no context at all.

Also: FEET OF CLAY by Terry Pratchett.

Is it possible for me to love Watch Commander "Sir" Samuel Vimes any more? Probably the answer is always, because I have thought the same thing in every book in which he appears, and yet the bar keeps on getting raised. In today's episode: Vimes hates toffs, but circumstances have conspired to weight each of his victories generously with embarrassment, and now for some reason he is one. That is, he's exactly the same as he always was, but people keep trying to shave him, or assassinate him, and his life is pitted all over with awkward parties and moral nausea. Will he ever be able to play cards in peace again? (Has he ever been able to do anything in peace?)

This book has golems! I love golems! I hope they don't get mixed up in one of Ankh-Morpork's perennial attempts to restore the monarchy, but the back cover strongly suggests that they will. Carrot is still writing letters home, and his partnership with Angua has gotten even more adorable. In keeping with plans to establish a department of Looking at Clues and Things (official name pending), they've hired a dwarf alchemist named Cheery Littlebottom - I like Vimes' attempts to be culturally sensitive (or maybe just to throw Cheery off by not laughing at his name) and Littlebottom's feat of Sherlockian cigar detection:

"I want someone who can look at an ashtray and tell me what kind of cigars I smoke."

"Pantweed's Slim Panatellas," said Littlebottom automatically.

"Good gods!"

"You've left the packet on the table, sir."

Also, will Sybil ever be as magnificent again as she was in Guards! Guards!, or has she been permanently demoted to occasional plot device? I guess I'll find out!

What I Plan to Read Next

I don't know what's next in my mystery bundle, but I know I'm going to read it! Plus the next Ngaio Marsh, whatever we're up to now.

Archived from Livejournal

What I've Finished Reading

The Masters by C. P. Snow( was not too bad )

Men at Arms was full of surprises, and one very welcome non-surprise: Vimes is back in the Watch where he belongs, even if it means having a knighthood foisted on him. No sacrifice too great! I'm not sure that I'm competent to summarize the plot, but it involves a string of mysterious murders committed by a terrifying new weapon, and another attempt to restore hereditary monarchy in Ankh-Morpork, this time with adopted dwarf policeman Carrot Ironfoundersson as the (unwilling and uninterested) long-lost heir. The inventor of the "gonne," Leonard of Quirm, is normally so ahead of his time as to be incomprehensible, but there's always a market for new ways to kill people horribly. In the end, the prototype is destroyed, but is that really the end of it? It seems like there's a parallel here with the failed restorations, here and in Guards! Guards! re: time only going one way. In Star Trek people are always destroying prototypes and never thinking about them again, but I have a feeling the weapons developers of Ankh-Morpork are going to be performing a lot of experiments with gunpowder from now on.

As before, after saving the city, the Night Watch presents a list of "new arrangements" for its organization, including

"--a department for, well, we haven't got a name for it yet, but for looking at clues and things like dead bodies, e.g., how long they've been dead. . ."

<3

I also didn't expect to be SUDDENLY IN TEARS when Vimes' secret account books were revealed, but here we are. It's not like it was unexpected, or even "not a cliche," but both those things made it absolutely perfect. Vimes may have the bad luck to inhabit a landscape of subversion, but that doesn't mean he isn't going to go on playing it straight. And now he has buckets of money! What will he do with it? And the Watch, here and in the future, is rapidly being restored to its former state of "functioning non-vestigial organization." It'll be interesting to see how Vimes responds to the new status quo. I hope the next book doesn't twist itself into knots trying to lead him back to the bottle, but we'll see.

I liked so many things about the book that the things I didn't like as well have sort of shriveled from my mind. I can't decide, looking back, whether I liked the Clown Murders subplot overall or not. I think "clowns aren't really funny" may be one of those humor tropes that have worn out through overuse, though Pratchett can't necessarily be blamed for using it in 1996. And the business with the dogs left me feeling a little squeamish, though I'm not completely sure why yet. I wish there'd been more Sybil -- she was mostly in the background here, and subdued compared to the booming, tweedy human mountain in rubber boots I know and love from Guards! Guards! I loved the asides about famous historical landscape architect Bloody Stupid Johnson, who never met a measurement he didn't foul up somehow, leading to one-inch-wide trout lakes and statue gardens so small they are kept in a drawer for safekeeping, who also "had 2,000 tons of earth built into an artificial hillock in front of Quirm Manor because 'It'd drive me mad to have to look at a bunch of trees and mountains all day long, how about you?'"

What I'm Reading Now

The Dark Lantern by Henry Williamson, first in the 15-volume Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight novel series listed as one novel for 99 Novels purposes. ( Burgess spends more time warning readers about these books than praising them )

Also: Eugenie Grandet by everyone's my favorite walking disaster, Honore de Balzac! I've immediately been seized by the same reaction Balzac's contemporaries must have had, and every other reader for almost two hundred years: How can Balzac describe this miser so thoroughly while being incapable of saving any money himself? It's pleasant to share this simple bafflement with so many invisible strangers, even if it isn't really that baffling when you think about it: knowing how other people do things and bringing yourself to do them are different skills. It's a little strange to read a novel for the first time after reading a biography of the author. It's like reading my brother's fiction: I feel like I can see all the little pieces of himself rearranged - I imagine I can see them even when I have no evidence.

What I Plan to Read Next

I'm going to be completely without internet access for the next two weeks, so I'll be finishing the books I've started but without posting for a while. I'm bringing Guermantes with me, The Caine Mutiny and maybe Balthazar by Lawrence Durrell (but maybe not). Also: The Just City by Jo Walton. There was a free ebook giveaway at Tor (you can get it here through the 7th) but I don't have an ereader so I just got it from the library.

Archived from Livejournal

What I've Finished Reading

This week is going to be a catching-up week, in which I scramble for something to say about last Wednesday's reading. Next week will probably have a similar catching-up quality, if I get to it at all.

( Guards! Guards! )

( Scenes from Provincial Life )

( The Disenchanted )

What I'm Reading Now

Possession is nine-tenths of the law, and also the name of a book I have spent decades not reading, despite having been assured many times that it is full of the things I like (represented so far: epigraphs from real authors, epigraphs from made-up authors, unexpected discoveries of letters, people getting book flakes on their fingers, shocking thefts of valuable letters from a library). Well, those days are over! osprey_archer is reading Possession and I have agreed to read Possession, too. I am only on Chapter One, but I look forward to this new, post-Possession era of my life. It's a largeish book with a hell of a lot of epigraphs, and you know how easy it is to impress me by throwing a big plateful of epigraphs my way. Candy from a baby.

The story so far: A guy is doing research on a nineteenth century poet when he stumbles on a couple of drafts of a letter to an unknown lady admirer, tucked into a book from the poet's library. Who is she? Was the letter ever mailed? Did they meet again? Why this sudden confusion of passion? Will this change everything we think we know about the poet and his life? Our researcher slips the letters into one of his own books and goes away rippling with questions.

What I'm hoping it will turn out to be: another edge-of-the-seat academic fact-hunt like The Daughter of Time only with less face detection and less unwarranted gloating about miners. One of the back-jacket blurbs calls it a "thriller," which either supports my theory or undermines it, depending what The Times (London) thinks count as thrills.

What I Plan to Read Next

Shit, A Dance to the Music of Time is twelve volumes? And A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight is fifteen! Fucking hell, Anthony Burgess.

For some reason, I was thinking these were quartets, like the Alexandria Quartet (also counted as a single novel in 99 Novels). But no.

What I've Finished Reading

Not much! Uninteresting circumstances have made it hard for me to concentrate this week, so I didn't get far with any books that aren't super easy to read. I finished Mort, in which Death takes a human apprentice and tries to get a more relaxing job "maybe something nice with cats or flowers." The apprentice screws everything up due to excessive compassion and anyway, Death isn't allowed to take a break; it's as bad as being a fictional detective. I read Hot Water by P. G. Wodehouse, which was pleasantly full of American con artists trying to con one another.

I did finish The Body, which I liked a lot, though there was a caricature of myself at 19 at the back of my mind going, "Ugh, another book about male jealousy, ugh" and worrying that Bishop was going to kill his wife in the end. But my present self thought it was beautifully written, funny and suspenseful. It's like Leontes' monologue in The Winter's Tale, but suburban: two great tastes that turn out to go great together. And Bishop's jellyfish uxoriousness is appealing even as he's tearing himself to pieces for no reason - or possibly that's just me. Anyway, another hit from the 99 Novels list.

What I'm Reading Now

A bunch of things I keep closing after five pages, through no fault of their own.

I promised osprey_archer I would join her in reading Lady Chatterly's Lover, so I started that this morning. The last thing I read by D. H. Lawrence was in 2008 or so and I vaguely remembered his prose style being kind of overheated and fairy-taleish (possibly incorrectly) so I was surprised that the first two chapters of LCL are extremely straightforward and explanatory, almost like a Baby-Sitters' Club opening chapter, where everyone's traits are dealt out to us at the outset. Connie and Clifford married without knowing each other very well, then Clifford went to war and came back paralyzed from the waist down. Clifford wants to be a writer but is thwarted by his lack of an inner life, or something like that; Connie wants a sex life but is thwarted by Clifford's paralysis. Cultural osmosis (and the back cover) tells me that this book will be about Connie having an affair, or maybe several affairs, rather than about Clifford and Connie learning to work with Clifford's limitations. But we'll see!

What I Plan to Read Next

It's C. P. Snow time again! And I'll have to catch up with my other books sometime, hopefully soon.