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Apr. 10th, 2012 11:54 amLast night and the night before failed to reach zero degrees, but only just. This meant I dreamed of autumn leaves. It also meant I eyed the heaters nervously, wondering if it's time to bring them out, but it's not quite time, yet. They normally emerge from hiding on my birthday which is over two weeks away.
Instead of heaters, I'm making a sorry excuse for chicken soup (using available ingredients, which include a parve chicken stock, parve chicken stock just feels wrong), mainly so that I can make matzah balls (which my family calls kneidlach) and be seasonal. In a few hours, I shall have many balls.
My fun book of the day is Helen Lowe's new one. I'm enjoying it muchly, but it keeps getting rudely interrupted by work I'm behind on. It contains exactly what I'm missing in reading those other books, however, so I'm reading it despite my deadlines.
My BiblioBuffet books are young adult and science and Medieval and I'm trying very hard not to read them all at once or to lose them. I need to have finished reading with them and writing them up by Thursday night, because I have to get one of my write-ups to my editor and if not one, why not three and be caught up on something? Also, I have much bus-riding, which means that I can read them and take notes and still get to all those dental appointments.
At this stage in my reading life, I've seen certain types of books once (or maybe twenty times) too often. Whether I like the novel depends less on its technical expertise and the glory of its editing than whether the book has a certain inner life. If it makes me smile, or laugh, or weep, or wonder, or if I want to know about the main characters - then it doesn't matter if I've read the book by other names and other writers. More and more, though, I'm finding novels that are solid in terms of technique, but where I think "How many more pages?"
Invention and pace have never been the main reasons for me to enjoy a novel, and right now that's proving a disadvantage, for invention and pace are becoming more and more prevalent as the reasons some publishers think we read. But as a young teenager I didn't love "To Kill a Mockingbird" for its sparkly invention and its rapid headlong rush into doom (which is good, because it doesn't have them) - I loved it for the characters and the story it told and for its immense radiance.
It really wouldn't take much to infuse these technically marvellous books I'm reading now with a bit more soul or heart. If someone is capable of writing a book so tight that every word matters and the build-up is inexorable and the quips fly, then surely they are capable of demonstrating to me that they love their book and that I must, too?
It's not just new writers, or writers who don't challenge us who leave me wondering where the soul has gone. This is my personal quibble with China Mieville's recent work. Perdido Street Station has so much heart - it's a sprawling giant, grinning and grimacing in equal measure. I adore that book. I'm not sure I want to read his most recent book, for The City and the City was cool and intellectual and didn't reach out to me in anything near the same way.
Instead of heaters, I'm making a sorry excuse for chicken soup (using available ingredients, which include a parve chicken stock, parve chicken stock just feels wrong), mainly so that I can make matzah balls (which my family calls kneidlach) and be seasonal. In a few hours, I shall have many balls.
My fun book of the day is Helen Lowe's new one. I'm enjoying it muchly, but it keeps getting rudely interrupted by work I'm behind on. It contains exactly what I'm missing in reading those other books, however, so I'm reading it despite my deadlines.
My BiblioBuffet books are young adult and science and Medieval and I'm trying very hard not to read them all at once or to lose them. I need to have finished reading with them and writing them up by Thursday night, because I have to get one of my write-ups to my editor and if not one, why not three and be caught up on something? Also, I have much bus-riding, which means that I can read them and take notes and still get to all those dental appointments.
At this stage in my reading life, I've seen certain types of books once (or maybe twenty times) too often. Whether I like the novel depends less on its technical expertise and the glory of its editing than whether the book has a certain inner life. If it makes me smile, or laugh, or weep, or wonder, or if I want to know about the main characters - then it doesn't matter if I've read the book by other names and other writers. More and more, though, I'm finding novels that are solid in terms of technique, but where I think "How many more pages?"
Invention and pace have never been the main reasons for me to enjoy a novel, and right now that's proving a disadvantage, for invention and pace are becoming more and more prevalent as the reasons some publishers think we read. But as a young teenager I didn't love "To Kill a Mockingbird" for its sparkly invention and its rapid headlong rush into doom (which is good, because it doesn't have them) - I loved it for the characters and the story it told and for its immense radiance.
It really wouldn't take much to infuse these technically marvellous books I'm reading now with a bit more soul or heart. If someone is capable of writing a book so tight that every word matters and the build-up is inexorable and the quips fly, then surely they are capable of demonstrating to me that they love their book and that I must, too?
It's not just new writers, or writers who don't challenge us who leave me wondering where the soul has gone. This is my personal quibble with China Mieville's recent work. Perdido Street Station has so much heart - it's a sprawling giant, grinning and grimacing in equal measure. I adore that book. I'm not sure I want to read his most recent book, for The City and the City was cool and intellectual and didn't reach out to me in anything near the same way.