Wednesday Reading Meme

[flemmings]

What did you just finish reading?

Pratchett, A Blink of the Screen; present from incandescens last October. Somehow thought these were essays, but of course they're not. Short stories, including the excellent The Sea and Little Fishes. More Granny Weatherwax, hurray. (Alas, has also disinclined me to read The Long Earth. Didn't know Pratchett *could* write like that.)

Read in an evening because I was getting burned out by my current reading:

LeGuin, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea. Somehow thought these were essays, but of course they're not. She does have an essay by way of foreword, where she says the science of SF isn't what mainly concerns her; it's the people. Err, well, maybe. I admire LeGuin but her stories are often so moral and didactic that they depress me. Like Lessing; like Sheri S Tepper. Easier to take than either of those but not ever-- I don't know. Fluffy, mangaish, fun, even when she thinks they are.

Irene Lin-Chandler, The Healing of Holly-Jean. A mystery which ought to be new and different. Lin's a Taiwanese writer with an international background, the book's about a mixed-race Chinese-English detective and it's set in London. But what she investigates is computer software counterfeiting, the details of which go right over my head, until she's called on to investigate a gang of white supremacist football oiks who've been sexually attacking Asian ESL students. I mean, new and different, yes-- instead of the reflex man trouble of the Urban Fantasy heroine, Holly-Jean has woman trouble. But still a slog.

Still have Judith Merkle Riley's The Oracle Glass. Wonder if I'll ever get into/ finish it?

What will you read next?

The third Toby Daye when it comes in to the library. Or possibly one of the three mysteries I picked up off the boulevard on Monday. Elizabeth George looks so much better than what I've got going.

(I still have a list of to be reads from the library-- Lesley Livingston, Eva Ibbotson, more Pico Iyer, a slew of Japanese crime writers in translation. But there's also too many books sitting around here.)

Comments

[mvrdrk.livejournal.com]

Huh. Never thought of Lessing as SF! A friend insisted I read Lessing when I was on bed rest with the first baby. Depressing as hell and ponderous and didn't strike me as SF at all. Tepper can be fun, or dismally fun as it were. I never noticed the moral and didactic in LeGuin, more the plodding-ness of it all. LOL! The things that go over my head!

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

I wasn't actually thinking of Lessing's SF, which I've never read, just her general attitude of deep earnestness. LeGuin-- not always, but a lot of the time-- conveys a similar, American Puritan sense that Things Matter. I mean yes, Things Do, but if that sense predominates no matter how fluffy the story's supposed to be, it makes for heavy reading.

[yumiyoshi.livejournal.com]

I feel the same way you do about LeGuin, glad to know I am not the only one XD I don't have any love for dressing up an essay and telling me it's a story, but I think most SFF people don't feel this way, judging by Nebula lists. >_> To each their own, I suppose.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Or dressing up an anthropology report. ^_^ My reading in SF isn't wide, but my impression is that those Nebula guys do love them their world-building details and sense of deep meaning. And if that's at the expense of characterization, well, that just makes it more Golden Age.

I really do admire LeGuin and like her values. When it came out, The Left Hand of Darkness was stunning. But her characters don't impress me as people at all.