reading wednesday

[boxofdelights]

What are you currently reading?

I have started Menage, by Alix Kates Shulman, The Language of Flowers, by Vanessa Diffenbaugh, and The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. Am not loving any of them. I don't really need to finish The Night Circus: the book group I was reading it for got rescheduled away from Valentines Day and into conflict with Mungo's jazz band concert. I went to the concert.

What did you recently finish reading?

Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn. My fear that it would leave loose ends all over the place was unfounded. The plot is neat and satisfying. The characters are hard to like. They care more about what things look like -- things like their marriages, for example -- than what they actually are.

What will you read next?

I do not know.

Comments

[laughingrat]

I've heard Night Circus definitely wasn't a hit with everyone. I'm trying to read Mysteries of Udolpho but just hitting a giant snag, namely, that it's going to make people suffer at great length for hundreds of pages--melodramatically--for basically no reason at all. At least that's what it looks like. Hmm.

[boxofdelights]

Yeah, my friend who liked Mysteries of Udolpho finds fictional suffering interesting for its own sake. Not me.

[laughingrat]

I'm glad I'm not the only one--I was feeling like I wasn't a "strong" enough reader or something! ! :-P

[amaebi]

You found the end satisfying? I didn't-- too neat for me. And of course you're right that both principles were remarkably unappetizing-- he in believable, she in incredible ways.

[boxofdelights]

I think I don't mind neat endings in novels. Too many coincidences in service of the plot can bounce me out of the story, but not at the end -- maybe because it's the end, and I was leaving anyway?

[boxofdelights]

And her parents, too! I kept thinking that "perfect marriage" facade was supposed to be unappealing, but then in the author's note at the end she said that her own parents had a perfect marriage.