In between whining at Will about having a cold and some bouts of heavy sleep, I read quite a bit.
Sunday: This Wicked Gift by Courtney Milan (novella), The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, edited by Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall (an old ARC)
Monday: Killing Silk by Nathalie Gray (Samhain), Wicked Gentlemen by Ginn Hale (Blind Eye Books)
Yesterday: Demon Forged by Meljean Brook (sent by Meljean), The World Five Minutes From Now by Ryu Murakami (an old ARC), and Winter’s Daughter by J.C. Wilder (a winning prize, sent by J.C. Wilder)
Today: Killer by Dave Zeltserman (an ARC from Serpent’s Tail; due out in January 2010) and – not done yet – The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown (a ‘stop whining and cheer up!’ present by Will)
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
When I’m not so lazy I’ll share my thoughts on these books. (I’m so bad with book reviewing that I approach book reviewing as if I was preparing to visit a dentist’s.)
For what it’s worth, I found Gray’s Killing Silk the least enjoyable; Hale’s Wicked Gentlemen the most intriguing, Murakami’s The World Five Minutes From Now the most frustrating*, and Zeltserman’s Killer the most shallow (it is a compelling story – narrates by a former Boston-based Mafia hitman (who’s half-German Jew and half-Italian Catholic) through a fun structure of different time periods; similar to Sergio Leone’s film Once Upon a Time in America, but between the 1970s and the present – but I couldn’t help but wish it had a deeper depth). The rest were rather enjoyable reads.
*The problem with Ryu Murakami’s novels: whenever he’s bored he tends to inject a series of massive shocks of something gory or horrific to make it lively, which can sometimes ruin his attempt to create a well-constructed story. It’s akin to finding a dead rat in a bowl of soup for absolutely no reason. So frustrating. Sixty-Nine is a fun coming-of-age novel, for instance, but by fuck, how did he love to chuck in random incidents designed to shock its reader. The problem is, some incidents held no relation to the main story. A little like a habit that Bret Easton Ellis has with some of his novels. When Murakami isn’t bored, his writing is out of the world. I simply don’t get why he thinks it’s all right to be so self-indulgent with his writing. It’s as if he wants to be seen as Takeshi Miike of the Literary world, but it only makes me want to plant a steel toe boot in his face. Oh, sorry. Was that a rant? Yes, it is. Sorry about that.
You must read even faster than I do, and I thought I got through books quickly.
I have vague memories of reading The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe for my thesis. It was interesting to have a peek over the edge, so to speak, because my thesis was focussed on Castile in the late Middle Ages, and the essays in this volume are about the post-Reformation period and/or in places over the Pyrenees.
Oh no, I’m partly a speed reader because of the old job, and partly because I have a habit of nipping in and out with a selection of books over a period of time. I finished all those books on those days, not necessarily same days I started them.
As a person with a life-long interest in pre-20th century global social history, I thought ‘The Place of the Dead’ was fun, but suffered the same problem as some other edited works: some essays were awesome and some were, well, not so awesome.
Castile, eh? From what I know (read: very little), they were just as feisty as those in the Borders were.
Castile, eh? From what I know (read: very little), they were just as feisty as those in the Borders were.
Och aye! and Si!
Being half Spanish and born and brought up in Scotland, I do find similarities in the way that both Scots and Spaniards are treated by the romance genre. Obviously the brave/barbaric/be-kilted Scots who tend to appear in single-title historicals are different from the ruthless/aristocratic/billionaire Spaniards who are most often to be found in Harlequin Presents/Mills & Boon Moderns, but it seems to me that they are both rather frequently typecast as an kind of exotic “other.”
Hahahaha… oh yeah, the ‘otherness’ – the bane of my romance reading life.
I wish you were on Twitter a couple of months ago because Robin and I discussed this subject about Native Americans (her personal interest), East Asians and Highlanders, and the entire ‘otherness’ thing.
In fairness – it’s not just the romance genre as other genres are guilty of this, but it does seem that the rom genre habitually associates the foreignness with the ‘savageness’ in context of the ‘bad boy’ trope. Mad, bad and dangerous to know, so to speak.
I’m thinking that I’m glad I don’t constantly think about this sort of thing because otherwise, I’d be in therapy. Probably for years.
I’m also thinking it’s bad luck that the rom genre seems to love generating the “otherness” out of three things that feature heavily in my life: Scotland, disabilities, and East Asians. O, woe is me! (laughing)