recuperation

I've been traveling quite a bit within the US--enough so that I wound up at the Minneapolis/Saint Paul airport twice in one week. (It's actually a cute little airport.) Since I'm sort of between projects--or more accurately, I've read enough for the current project that I need to start writing about what I've read before I read more--I've been catching up on fiction while in flight. Here are the books I've been reading:

The Historian

I found this book horribly frustrating; I particularly disliked the author's characterization of academic labor. (I didn't really like Dracula either, and sometimes epistolary novels rub me the wrong way.) But I kept reading it, largely for its account of the landscape of south-eastern Europe and to find out how the story would end. The books most redeeming moment is when one of the characters is condemned to the eternal torture of cataloging Count Dracula's library in Latin equipped with only a typewriter. I found this hilarious; I think it was supposed to be tragic.

Watership Down

Rabbits and WWII-era British codes of honor: what can be wrong about that? Somehow I passed three decades without ever reading this. I'm glad this is no longer the case. Frankly, I used Adams' prose to wash the taste of The Historian out of my mouth.

City of Thieves

This was an interesting story, and I particularly liked the depictions of WWII-era Leningrad. My primary complaint is that it rather reads like a screenplay: the characters are somewhat flat, and the story wraps up a little too predictably. It got me from Chicago to Pittsburgh; I'm not sure it could do more.

Lavinia

I first encountered Le Guin's writing in the Earthsea chronicles. I'm picky as sin about my fantasy, and Le Guin delivers. She's also the daughter of an anthropologist, which endears her to me because I ascribe to it her attentiveness to portraying the everyday life of the imaginary worlds about which she writes. And while my unfamiliarity with the Aeneid made me feel a bit inadequate approaching this book, I thought it was a beautifully crafted text. It made City of Thieves feel about as substantial as a paper coffee cup.

The Gathering

This book came to my attention because it won the Man Booker Prize. I don't love everything that has won the prize, but I feel so much of it is quality writing that it's a good place to go for a reading list. I'm glad I picked up The Gathering. Enright can write, and she can write about grief in a way that expresses horror without becoming either maudlin or sentimental. Jodi Picoult can put that in her pipe and smoke it...

Next on my list: Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried...