This Reading Notes is going to take an odd bent for me, because it is Lent, and for Lent this year...I am not buying any books for myself. I'm reading only what I ALREADY HAVE. Don't weep too much for me, this needs doing. So I present to you the things I read in March, all of which I bought in the past intending to read and never did. Including the books I've started and finished this month in order to clear the backlog and generally become a better and holier person all around.
(I'm kidding. This is as holy as I'm likely to become.)
Here are the ones I've started and never finished until now! I'm quite proud of myself:
Eames was interesting and a good balance of background fact/Christie biography and narration of his own travel. Well done, glad I read it.
Dillard was like eating an incredibly rich, decadent black forest cake. I loved it, but I could only take small bites at a time. My head is still spinning and I want to read it again and again just...just to try and peel back more layers. I have a feeling it could be a different book each time I did. I also feel my lack of Thoreau.
Ferguson was, you know, he was fine. It was fine. Honestly it sort of blended into my brain and I've forgotten most of it now. Meh. It was okay.
Still haven't finished this one but made more headway. ..
Smith was very much a missed opportunity. The author could have produced a fascinating look at the secrets lying under England and instead chose to essentially provide a tour-guide synopsis of locations seemingly very well-known (I didn't know of them, mind you, but he mentions lots of books about them and finds guides for them easily and some of the caves have affiliated clubs, for heaven's sake) and generally pretty straight forward to reach. An underground art installation? A well-known royal tunnel? A submerged town??? Sheesh.
And I made it through several books that had been loitering on my shelves for some time now:
In my quest to read everything by Miss Read, I managed to finish Summer At Fairacre literally moments before dropping it in the bath. If that isn't a metaphor for our times I don't know what is.
I'm also working through everything written by L.M. Montgomery, so managed to add a few more titles of hers to the 'read' pile as well:
I really liked The Chronicles of Avonlea, which I wasn't convinced would be the case. I've read Mongomery's short stories before in The Doctor's Sweetheart and found them trite and uninspired and sometimes very odd, but this collection was charming!
On the other hand, Kilmeny of the Orchard is my least favorite Mongomery book to date. It was creepy. The characters were entirely one dimensional and very poorly thought out. The story was weak, and relied almost entirely on coincidence to make it work at all. Ah, how handy to have a 'foreigner' to blame things on! Well it's convenient that we have a famous throat doctor just hanging around when we need a famous throat doctor, isn't it! She's beautiful AND she plays the violin? You don't say!
Started but haven't finished this one either. ..
Good gravy but this was a simplistic bit of writing. I'm sure I've heard of this book for ages and always thought I should read it because clearly it resonated with so many people but...wow. That being said, I'm not much for the 'see your entire world illustrated in the curve on a conch shell' style of over-romanticized writing, but there are reams of devoted fans on Amazon for it - scrolling through the reviews I wonder if we were even reading the same book.
No comments:
Post a Comment