It's that wonderful time of the month when I swoon about like a Victorian maiden and the bathroom looks like the murder set in a C.S.I. teaser. And if you say women can't be President because of PMS I'll bite your nuts off. Don't expect profundity here.
What did you just finish reading?
A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, which was....no go. So, so no go. Too many characters, their relationships to each other were much too tangled (yes I know this was deliberate, it didn't work anyway), way too much history crammed into too few pages -- the book would have worked if it had been either 200 pages shorter or 200 pages longer, or two books (or....a quartet). The story really ends with Tom in 1908, and there are several big timejumps after that and then WWI begins and ends and is really glossed over. I found the final post-war epilogue, with the battered survivors eating dumpling soup, rather moving, except it was too little real emotion much too late. I was also ENRAGED by Tom's fate, and Byatt's horrible general theme that Writing is Bad for Children And Other Living Things (especially when done by mothers) is front and center.
After I forced myself through that I drifted around in a haze of Book Flu, which is when I have eight thousand eight hundred books in this apartment (and a couple thousand more on the ereader) and can't decide what to read. I hate Book Flu, it drives me nuts. It is usually only cured by snatching up a book at random and just starting it. Which I did. (After rereading some Pratchett Watch novels: Guards, Men At Arms, Feet of Clay.)
What are you reading now?
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, by Daniel Okrent bobbed to the top of the Kindle. This is definitely pop history: very slangy, lots of modern references ("Nearly ninety years before french fries became freedom fries...."), a bit glib and superficial. But for all that, it goes down easy, and there's a lot of colourful historical detail ("We need more colourful historical detail in this chapter, Daniel, can't you mention Billy Sunday again?"). The racist policies that partly drove Prohibition (both against black men and Germans) make me feel a bit sick. Gee, I don't remember any of that being mentioned in the page-and-a-half devoted to the Eighteenth Amendment in my eighth-grade history textbook. I wonder why. Sometimes Okrent is like that painfully wannabe-hip high school teacher who tried too hard to make history Engaging and Cool, but the book is still pretty good.
What do you expect to read next?
I was thinking of trying Room with a View again -- it's pretty light, but deeper underneath, and I've read it two or three times but think I never really did it justice. Possibly some mysteries. Nothing requiring much brainwork, probably.
descensus Averno facilis est