At least I didn't skip the week?
What did you just finish reading?
Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy, which was incredible -- I sped through the whole thing in about three and a half? days and afterwards felt like I'd burned out more than a few neurons. In a good way.
Anne Carson's Red Doc, which was beautiful but spiky. It was confusing but I think it's meant to confuse. Lots of
allegorical figures (Ida, Foresight, Pig Doctor), not people. All of a
sudden they're going to a glacier! then it's like Dante, climbing up the
back way what? to the mechanic of souls, then the clinic, the laundry
room, all glaring cold whiteness. These places all seem the same, mirror images of each other, rooms opening off the same long icy corridor. Not sure how Ida fits in. The mother's deathbed at the beginning, at the end. Splintered
like glass, like ice. But all the shards are beautiful. (Also, I fucking loved the ice bats.)
Faithful Place, Tana French -- don't ask me why I didn't read this til now (I read the whole series out of sequence: first the second book, then the first, then tore through the fourth, &c.) Cannot WAIT for the fifth book.
What are you reading now?
Just started reading Hermione Lee's monumental Edith Wharton. Eight hundred and sixty-nine pages, whew. And only about a hundred of those are notes, index, &c. Only just started, but it's very, very good.
What do you expect to read next?
I fucking loathe this question. Will probably be busy with Hermione on Edith for a while. I think instead of trying to guess my next (very very randomly chosen) read I'll fill this space with various TBR piles instead.
On my desk: Hermione, Dopehead by Tim Elhajj, Heroin from Hazelden's Library of Addictive Drugs series, Seattle Architecture, Neil Gaiman's Make Good Art speech, Squaring the Circle, Wolf Solent, The Glass of Time, Charles Dickens in Love, and the biography of Iris Murdoch I had to buy again because I had no idea where my original copy, bought when it first came out, was. Naturellement about a week and a half after buying it, I found its twin shyly peeking out at me from a bookcase about two feet away from the bed. Sigh.
Lots of good writers are posting interesting reviews to GoodReads now but I'm really sick of the whole voting system, plus I resent now being an unpaid content generator for Amazon.com. sigh again. World of web two-dot-oh, how I really do loathe you, corrupting and buying out and killing the virtual communities I love.
descensus Averno facilis est