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Okay, a fiction book I haven't read, but still. Memory & Dream is still slow going, still going. So I started also on The Wood Wife, recommended to me at the same time and by the same person. I keep stopping this one periodically, as well!
It's for much happier reasons, though. Where I tend to drop out of M&D when I can't take any more of it for a while, what keeps knocking me out of TWW is much kinder, though no better for successfully reading the story - it's a gorgeous book, lush with the sort of phrasing I like, including the poetic bits that show up and also the prose, both the in-character and the narrative prose. I don't normally put up any of my stuff, but I do write poetry - as well as prose that comes close, at times, which you may have seen here from time to time - and what keeps knocking me out of this book is the need to take down notes or start on a piece of my own. I'm loving it, but I'm torn two directions, between wanting to pursue my thoughts and wanting to read the book. I know it will be waiting when I come back, so I leave the book each time, but I suspect I shall have to reread it in one huge gulp later to get the feeling of what that is like - if it can be done, if more images don't leap out at me.
I had to renew M&D. I'm debating - I will either need to renew TWW, or buy it. I normally don't buy a book till I have read it through and I think I will stick to that, and yet, I am fairly sure already - less than 80 pages in - that I will in fact buy it.
The rest of my reading has been books about beadwork, and Peter Singer's Rethinking Life and Death, a book I expected to have a harder time reading than M&D. I actually don't. I dislike the stand that I know this man advocates (though as yet, I haven't hit the worse parts of it and don't know if they are in this book), but his writing style at least is clear. I simply figured I had gone long enough being disgusted by someone whose own words I had never read, and decided to see what I would find in them. He raises some interesting issues, even if I don't like where I understand his answers are likely to go.
I doubt I'll return to his book until I've gotten through The Wood Wife, though. A well-written ethical tangle whose ultimate conclusion you expect to find highly disagreeable, has a hard time competing with an exquisitely written artistic work of fiction that is giving you writing ideas, and you have no idea where it is going.
It's for much happier reasons, though. Where I tend to drop out of M&D when I can't take any more of it for a while, what keeps knocking me out of TWW is much kinder, though no better for successfully reading the story - it's a gorgeous book, lush with the sort of phrasing I like, including the poetic bits that show up and also the prose, both the in-character and the narrative prose. I don't normally put up any of my stuff, but I do write poetry - as well as prose that comes close, at times, which you may have seen here from time to time - and what keeps knocking me out of this book is the need to take down notes or start on a piece of my own. I'm loving it, but I'm torn two directions, between wanting to pursue my thoughts and wanting to read the book. I know it will be waiting when I come back, so I leave the book each time, but I suspect I shall have to reread it in one huge gulp later to get the feeling of what that is like - if it can be done, if more images don't leap out at me.
I had to renew M&D. I'm debating - I will either need to renew TWW, or buy it. I normally don't buy a book till I have read it through and I think I will stick to that, and yet, I am fairly sure already - less than 80 pages in - that I will in fact buy it.
The rest of my reading has been books about beadwork, and Peter Singer's Rethinking Life and Death, a book I expected to have a harder time reading than M&D. I actually don't. I dislike the stand that I know this man advocates (though as yet, I haven't hit the worse parts of it and don't know if they are in this book), but his writing style at least is clear. I simply figured I had gone long enough being disgusted by someone whose own words I had never read, and decided to see what I would find in them. He raises some interesting issues, even if I don't like where I understand his answers are likely to go.
I doubt I'll return to his book until I've gotten through The Wood Wife, though. A well-written ethical tangle whose ultimate conclusion you expect to find highly disagreeable, has a hard time competing with an exquisitely written artistic work of fiction that is giving you writing ideas, and you have no idea where it is going.
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I'll be reading. Your LJ is beautiful.
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Thank you!
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I do think it's a lot better written than, well, pretty much anything by de Lint. On the other hand, it's very much in the -tradition- of de Lint, who pretty much created the Urban Fantasy movement out of whole cloth, and who does continue to do interesting things. Just not as well as one might like.
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