Pithy quotes

I'm re-reading all my Ngaio Marshes, and the library's too (except the earliest ones that are a little crap). And in A Surfeit of Lampfreys I read the following:

Maternal anxiety, he thought, was the emotion that human beings most consistently misrepresent, degrading its passion into tenderness, its agony with pathos.

I done gone reflected then that this is perhaps the point of Majgull Axelsson's Moderspassion, that we read for the book club. But I still don't think it came across very well in that book.

yada yada yada

I have been reading, but mostly re-reading. I felt like loads of Laurie King, so I've re-read everything I had bar Touchstone which I wasn't that keen on, and borrowed whatever was at the library - not much, sadly, people read crime fiction when on their holidays, right? So I didn't get to read The Moor or Justice Hall... I put in a reservation for at least one though. We moved this summer, so I wasn't in the mood for new stuff, I wanted oldies and goodies. I don't think I ever blogged about To Play The Fool - but there seem to be several I never wrote about when I go back to check. Odd that. I think I've read them all bar the two newest ones and the collaborations and e-pubs. I also re-read some Jasper Fforde, and found one I hadn't read, One Of Our Thursdays Is Missing, which is too clever for its own good. When I compare it to the The Eyre Affair, The Fourth Bear (re-read) and Shades of Grey, that all manage to touch on real pain and human problems in between all the puns and jokes ... too much BookWorld is not a good thing.

I've been re-reading Laurie King

but now all our books are packed for the move. I might have to stop by the library.

The anachronistic bits are more noticeable when re-reading, but she's still my friend.

I read my sister's books and returned them

And checked and I'd missed writing anything about the Wil Wheaton ones. Well, she lent me Memories of the Future and  .... Just A Geek it was I believe.

I thoroughly enjoyed the first, and look forward very much to the rest of his Star Trek NG reviews. Surely he must do them all? Just A Geek was a little slower in bits, but I appreciate the honesty. I'm really pleased that he's carved a proper new career for himself. And apropos honesty ... he could do with being even grittier. Just saying fuck doesn't cut it. A bit deeper, a bit more introspective? He tries to protect his family, which is laudable, but to be a great writer you have to be able to get really private I think.

Note

Not one copy of Wuthering Heights will survive this purge.

Janet Evanovich

Found Plum Lucky at the library, it's the one about the leprechaun. One of the supernatural ones, with Diesel. Ok. And I forgot I'd read Plum Spooky so got that too, and read it for lack of anything else to do while lounging next to the playground.

Sue Grafton: V is for Vengeance

This is the one I forgot about the other week! And this is really the one that sort of re-awakened my fondness for characters I thought I'd stopped loving. I liked Kinsey in this one. I was also sort of amused by how made-for-80s-tv the main story was - the gangster-gone-good who falls in love with the mother of a young man his henchmen killed a few years ago. With the descriptions of clothes and all you could almost picture the screenshots. Nuff said.

Stephen Fry: The Liar

What is the point of this book I asked myself after reading a quarter of it, and considered not bothering with the rest. But I kept going, largely because I was in bed sick Wednesday (food poisoning probably, woe me) and ended up reluctantly reading the whole thing. But what was the point remains the focal question. He's put in a caveat on the first empty leaf thingie before the actual book (I forget the word for those empty pages): "Nothing here is true" it says or something to that effect. Having read the second part of his autobiography though I can see that the book echoes his life, so it's sort of true. But of course the book is called The Liar, and in his autobiography he writes how he's been afraid all his life of being discovered to be a fraud and trickster so ... I dunno. It doesn't grab me. The bits that are supposed to be more sincere are not. In a way, perhaps, it perfectly illustrates what Fry tries to say in his autobiography - that he isn't really terribly intelligent, he just has a good memory and is sort of a wit. Being able to see that automatically makes you of more than average intelligence of course. Ta-daa.

On the whole though? Dull. I just didn't enjoy it. Fittingly, it felt insincere and fake. But what's the point of that.

Majgull Axelsson: Moderspassion

Kort inlägg följer: det här var bokcirkelns senaste. Sist jag läste Majgull Axelsson måste varit i högstadiet eller gymnasiet möjligen, och det var nog Rosario är död. Jag minns det som en av de hemskaste böckerna jag läst, och det var nästan första gången det gick upp för mig att det fanns vuxna människor som gjorde barn så illa.

För mig är hon en barn- och ungdomsförfattare alltså (eftersom jag läste boken när jag var ungdom - dålig logik, men sån är jag) - så jag var alltså, i enlighet med Poängen med Bokcirkel, fullt beredd att omvärdera detta. Inledde med avsikten att låna boken på biblioteket, men den är konstant utlånad, så jag skulle köpa den online, men jag glömde, så med typ tre dagar på mig köpte jag den på Akademibokhandeln (som jag normalt inte vill handla i längre - vi saknar alla RIKTIGA LundeQ) för åttifem spänn - hutlöst. Men nåväl. Jag hann! Tur man har semester.

Boken är skriven huvudsakligen från Minnas synvinkel. Minna är ensamstående och föräldralös med en dotter i gymnasieåldern, och man förstår ganska raskt att något hänt denna dotter. Romanen äger rum, med vissa återblickar, under stormen år 2000 som översvämmade Arvika, och en skara människor samlas på Minnas vägkrog den natten och bevittnar den olycka som kommer att avslöja lögnen hon burit för sig själv under det senaste året. Minnas synvinkel är dock som sagt inte den enda, utan varje kapitel byter berättare. Det är ju helt okej. Ett problem är dock att det inte alltid känns så självklart vilka som fått vara berättare. Varför den men inte den. Varför inte dottern? Varför inte läkaren som utnyttjar dottern? Osv. Det finns fler aber, men det mynnar ut i en känsla av att boken blivit klar för snabbt, och inte bearbetats klart. Låt den ligga i byrålådan i fem år till, och ta fram den och skriv lite mer. Utveckla, jobba om. Det kunde blivit så. himla. bra. Nu är det okej. Bitvis väldigt gripande, men mer för att det ÄR det när det handlar om att barn dör än för att BOKEN blivit så fantastisk.

Nåväl, kul att läsa men inte riktigt värd 85 kr helt enkelt. Men jag är nöjd med läsandet.

Catchupcatchup

Janet Evanovich: Twelve Sharp
Refound my love for this series a little.

Lindsey Davis: Alexandria
Ditto. I liked how the big war in the great library is between weeders and non-weeders.

There was a third, but I can't find my note of this at the moment ... I had to return them all to the library you see.

Ray Bradbury is dead.

His books meant a great deal to me when I was a teenager. I've re-read them sporadically, but only blogged the once. Neil Gaiman has something nice up on his blog though, worth looking at.

Nurse Ratched.

That's who the train conductor reminds me of! Beautiful but stiff like.

What? It's a literary comment!

What did I get for my sister then?

Since I had to write about it here? Well, Jenny Lawson's book of almost course, Let's Pretend This Never Happened. Don't come here and accuse me of not being au courant with the blogging world. (But I'm really not.) Bonus: I get to read it later too.

She's not very quick, is she?

My sister, that is. Who clearly doesn't have my blog on a feed because no comment as of yet on the parcel that has arrived. Lordy lord.

The last exclamation brings me to the Sookie Stackhouse novel Living Dead in Dallas, which was part of my last library haul. This is the one where Sookie infiltrates the church belonging to The Fellowship of the Sun, also the one that finds Lafayette dead. The tv series really does a better job of that (I like Lafayette). No. 2 in the series.

Happy birthday little sister!

The other day I wrote a post on my phone...

... but the phone sorta ate it. You have to get it just right when blogging via the Blogger app, I'll have you know. It breaks down and just keeps asking you to switch accounts. Useless thing. Anyway, the post is gone, but what I wanted to tell you was that I went to a second-hand book shop and saw these super-darling paperback editions:

But at 50 kr apiece I'm not buying them, since I'm not, after all, very keen on Agatha Christie. But they were sweet. The next day I went to the Red Cross and checked out their selection and they had NOTHING. I was utterly disappointed.

I've read the new hit fantasy novel Cirkeln (it's being translated and will probably be called The Circle, right?) by Mats Strandberg and Sara Bergmark Elfgren - it's a breath of fresh air on the Swedish fantasy scene, but mostly for doing a great job on describing the kids that make up the coven of witches. The actual witchy bits are so-so really. But worth a read! Very exotic to foreigners I'm sure. Then for the book discussion club we read Sommarboken by Tove Jansson. It was okay. Didn't sing to me. Then I know I've read some other things that I've forgotten now. A shame that. Today I went to the library and I got a heap of paper-back crime fiction I hadn't read - I'll be back.

Bigamy

So I read Jane Eyre, and then The Nine Tailors because I felt like it, and I was reminded that I hadn't blogged about my new Victorian discovery - Wilkie Collins. I downloaded some ebooks because I kept reading that his novels were examples of early detective fiction; and not only that, he wrote about social injustices. Which I felt might be interesting. Oh, and bigamy: Jane Eyre - Mr Rochester wants to be a bigamist, in The Nine Tailors a woman is an unintentional bigamist and her presumed dead husband an intentional one, which is an important part of the plot (the woman is religious and doesn't want her daughters to be bastards for one), shich leads us to Collins's novel No Name from 1862, about a gentleman's daughters who discover, to their shock and surprise, that their parents were not married and that they have no right to their father's anything, including his name. Do you follow my train of thought? Bigamy?

So I'm re-reading Jane Eyre

And there is always something new to discover in good books isn't there? It hasn't been that long ago since I read Bryson's At Home,  and there he writes about how dark life was before electricity. Literally. Whole big rooms lit only by a fire,  a passage from someone's letter or journal describing a dining room dazzlingly illuminated by four candles. For some reason, now, I'm seeing this all through Jane Eyre. So many winter evenings spent in the dark indoors with only firelight. Getting dressed with only the last rays of moonlight to see the buttons by. It's so very specifically described: the school rooms at Lowood with long tables crammed full of girls of all ages, lit by a pair of candles per table. That scene where she meets Mr Rochester at the stile - it's almost dark then; my memory has been fooled by films I think into remembering it as daylight. When Jane returns to Thornfield she goes into Mrs Fairfax's room and sees Pilot by the light of only the fire. Everything so shadowy, always. She needs a candle, and rings for the servant. A candle. To walk upstairs with and change by.

The Farseer Trilogy

My colleague, who is totally into fantasy and science fiction (more Star Wars than Star Trek, sadly), said I should read Robin Hobb. So why not, I said, borrowed the first Farseer book (Assassin's Apprentice) and really liked it. Then I wanted to read the rest, and they were lost in the library. Sigh. My little sister had them though, so I made her bring them to me. Win! Exstatic review can be found here. Myself, I shall confess to becoming a little bored. It went on and on towards the end. Props for a sad, melancholy ending, but it took longer than it should have. I lost the magic. I made my sister bring me the other books set in that universe, and now I'm not feeling so inclined to read them, which makes me feel bad. I'm a selfish, bad person. I'll make it up to her with chocolate pie on Easter Monday.

When in doubt...

... re-read Jane Eyre.