reading wednesday
Feb. 6th, 2015 01:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
boxofdelights• What are you reading?
Cambridge, by Susanna Kaysen. I've had this checked out from the library for the maximum number of renewals. It kept getting bumped by more interesting-looking or urgent books. But now I remember why I took it from the New Books shelf all those weeks ago: I love the voice. It reminds me of the beginning of The Fountain Overflows: the narrator is an adult, of course, but she's doing a really good job of telling us what her seven-year-old self understood as flying, as falling in love with a statue, as playing detective in another family's house.
• What did you recently finish reading?
Stitches, by Anne Lamott. I loved Operating Instructions so much. I still think of it when I pull a tiniest bandaid out of the bandaid box. Stitches is about how to cope with the fact that life is suffering, and how to support someone else who is coping with that, which I need now as much as I needed Operating Instructions then, but the balance has tilted away from vivid details and memorable stories towards general conclusions.
• What do you think you’ll read next?
I really have to read The Golem and the Jinni now. Book group next week.
Cambridge, by Susanna Kaysen. I've had this checked out from the library for the maximum number of renewals. It kept getting bumped by more interesting-looking or urgent books. But now I remember why I took it from the New Books shelf all those weeks ago: I love the voice. It reminds me of the beginning of The Fountain Overflows: the narrator is an adult, of course, but she's doing a really good job of telling us what her seven-year-old self understood as flying, as falling in love with a statue, as playing detective in another family's house.
• What did you recently finish reading?
Stitches, by Anne Lamott. I loved Operating Instructions so much. I still think of it when I pull a tiniest bandaid out of the bandaid box. Stitches is about how to cope with the fact that life is suffering, and how to support someone else who is coping with that, which I need now as much as I needed Operating Instructions then, but the balance has tilted away from vivid details and memorable stories towards general conclusions.
• What do you think you’ll read next?
I really have to read The Golem and the Jinni now. Book group next week.
no subject
Date: 2015-02-06 04:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-02-06 09:22 pm (UTC)balance has tilted away from vivid details and memorable stories towards general conclusions.
Oh that's too bad, those are my favorite kinds of books. Hard data is one thing, but anecdata can be so illustrative! Especially as sometimes conclusions are more guesses than solid (cf. that one later Malcolm Gladwell book, the third or fourth one).
no subject
Date: 2015-02-07 11:31 pm (UTC)The good news about a writer in the family is access to a shinier, second-hand version of one's youth (and in this case 7 years pre-birth). Some of the "characters" were familiar to me, and beautifully captured. Both her audible voice and her writerly voice are lovely, although by mutual consent we haven't heard each other in ten years.