Thus intarwebs makes airheads of us all...

[flemmings]

I wonder if it's late onset adult ADD, this inability to concentrate on anything for any period of time, this restless search for something to divert me, and the inevitable return to addiction solitaire. Currently in my reading lineup, begun and discarded and picked up again half-heartedly, we have--

Ouchou Romanse 3-- bogged down in archaic constructions.

Akushumi na Bigaku-- pulled from the boxes because of the pointy-eared demon on the cover, hence cool fantasy: but no-- it's a late volume in a manga series about a bunch of rich decadent Parisians, and the demon's pointed ears are just strategically placed leaves from the flowers that surround him? her? for no good reason. Confusing as hell, because of 'who are these people and why am I supposed to know them?'

The Fall of the Kings-- Hullo, Marty Stu, good-bye heart. I'm waiting for this to resemble Pratchett in any way shape or form, and it's not doing it. What it is doing is irritating a particular idiosyncracy of mine. Western names don't come from nowhere; there's a reason for those names, rooted firmly in one or more of Christianity, Judaism, European history and ancient Near Eastern history. If I meet someone called Basil in a country where no one has ever known Greek, possibly because Greece doesn't exist, ima gonna wonder why he's called after the Greek word for king. Peters without Latin rocks, Edwards without any Old English ead weards. How come? (This doesn't bother me in Pratchett, of course. Discworld mirrors roundworld, and it's fine for Ankh-Morpork cops to bear Hebrew names meaning 'asked of God, singular.')

Hawksmoor-- like every Ackroyd novel, this book tells me more about London than I want to know.

Driving Force-- from the $1 bin at BMV books (I will not call it the loonie bin I won't I won't I won't); a Dick Francis I can't recall from its opening pages, though of course I've read it because I've read all of him. Farther in I can identify it (ie 'it's the one with the computer') though I have no memory of the plot. Is still not the one where the guy has a gay flatmate who shows him how to put on make-up, which I've been trying to find again for years.

Comments

[summer-queen.livejournal.com]

I just could not get into The Fall of the Kings. It bored me to tears, which makes me sad, since I wanted very much to like it.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

It doesn't bore me as much as Privilege did to start with, but that's because I'm expecting some kind of Corn King nasty rites to rear their maenad heads. Some time. Eventually. If only Petronia hadn't said it sounds like Unseen University done straight rather than the Watch. Though straight is about the only way I could take Unseen University because the jolly doings of eccentric professors is not only a common enough theme in British light works, it's a dull one.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I didn't mean that as a compliment, though! XD;

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

I didn't think you did; but I'm pretty sure the UUisch trope existed before Pratchett. You may find echoes of it in its bastard colonial cousin, The Rebel Angels. It's just, I assume? that tFotK isn't social comedy and anything else I can think of is.

(Racking brains here. The feeling I get from memories of reading random minor English authors is that when the Brits write universities it's from the pov of the undergraduate ie the author himself bildungsroman-ing; and when they write teachers they're always the put-upon masters of second-rate public schools ie the author himself trying to make a living (horrible Boys!); and that it's the Americans who usually write university professor protagonists. That's entirely off the top of my head, though.)

ETA- and wrong. Quite enough Brits represented here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campus_novel) in the Campus Novel, including *of course* CP Snow.