domenica, novembre 10, 2013

Reading list

The F-word is getting ready for his first exhibition in about two weeks' time. Inbox me for the info, if you wish, although I think I have precisely zero Victorian readers - insert mandatory joke about cultural prudishness here - and then insert joke about verb "insert" in the context of discussion of prudishness.

And I'm just trying to seize what downtime the boy leaves me to enjoy reading books before starting with languages again - German will get underway in mid January. If that sentence sounds whiny, i shouldn't. The boy gives me a fair bit of downtime, especially now that he's started having one uber-nap instead of three micro-naps every day. But I'm disproportionately upset about having got into The Lacuna, a Barbara Kingsolver book. 50 pages in I felt like it was seriously overwritten but I kept going because of the mother-child relationship making it reasonably interesting; 300 pages in I started suspecting I was wasting my precious time on what was less of a story and more a collection of quite nice, let it be said, sentences and descriptive passages. Once I saw the narrator safely off to Asheville and no longer gave even a fraction of a fuck, I gave up. Not something I usually do at that point. So given the lack of time I suffer from, and given it was a reccommendation that wouldn't have crossed my desk otherwise, I'm miffed.

When we were packing in L____ I made myself up a box of books I had that I wanted to read in Melbourne. Hard for me to gauge what I'm going to be able to get through in the 20 to 22 months left to us in Australia, what with the boy and language studies, but there's always the library here, which is quite good and where I got that Kingsolver waste of time. First book outta there after ditching it was Oliver Sacks' Island of the Colour Blind. I have a real weakness for him. I don't know if he's my favourite pop science writer, but he's certainly the one I like best who's most prolific, and I'd have read even more of his stuff if airport bookstores stocked more of it - it's perfect for that. Anyways, this book feels like a bit of a departure from the rest of his that I've read. He's writing about someone else's party - clusters of disorders, genetic conditions, or mysterious ailments in Pacific islands that other people are studying, mostly, but he got to go look at. It's tota