(no subject)
Jun. 14th, 2004 12:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aslantrecent books:
1. the rule of four, by ian caldwell and dustin thomason. review in a nutshell: please do not waste your money buying this book. slightly extended review: it is awful. it is a transparent plot, with little or no focus on the hypnerotomachia poliphili (“poliphilo’s struggle for love in a dream”), upon which it purports to rest its plot, and it is otherwise a tiresome work of nostalgic princeton-undergraduate-lifehomage fellatio. it’s a lot like this: oh my god, when i was at princeton, this one time, ohmigod, it was hilarious, see, we went into this underground tunnel, and we totally almost got caught, and then to escape, like, we totally had to take our clothes off so it looked like we were with the naked olympics people!?!?!!!1!! a lot of stuff like that, except written in boorishly ‘clever’ prose, with repetitive descriptions of totally uninteresting details about the campus and aspects of princeton undergraduate life. if you want to know a lot of sophomoric details about princeton dinner clubs, this is a good resource for you, maybe, if you wade through all the other bullshit. partway through, i realized that the only female character was modelled on joey potter from dawson's creek. she's smart! she's athletic! all the guys love her and they don't know why! she's sweet, yet sad! she has a creamy nougat center! ugh. i'm sure messrs caldwell & thomason would never admit to watching that show, but that's too bad, because watching it might have helped them develop a FUCKING CLUE ABOUT WHAT IS INTERESTING IN A STORY. i didn’t care about this book, or its plot, because i didn’t care about its narrator, and thus didn’t care about its characters. it made me long for donna tartt’s the secret history, which ‘the rule of four’ rudely and lamely attempts to copy; undergraduates fall into study of an obscure topic with brilliant & crazy professors, attempt to untangle a complex historical mystery/attempt to untangle a complex crime or occurance. after i finished (begrudgingly) ‘the rule of four’, i promptly re-read ‘the secret history’, to cleanse my palate and remind me that there is such a thing as good writing by debut novelists.
2. the little black book of stories, by a.s. byatt. kirk bought this for me, which is lovely because i never think to buy books of short stories for myself, but i usually enjoy them. my favorites by far were 'a stone woman', about a woman who slowly turns to stone, and 'raw material', which contains a long story-within-a-story, about laundry day in a turn-of-the-century house. (my love of antique methods of laundry & general housekeeping will come up later, see #4.) a small book, perfect for the subway, and beautifully written. very good if, like me, you fall asleep at night easily and need a (physically) light-weight book which you can read & fall asleep to, often, without losing the plot of the story entirely.
3. she's not there, by jennifer finney boylan. this book i read very quickly, at work on a very boring afternoon, because someone happened to have it lying around, and the office bookclub had read it recently. it is an autobiography about a colby college professor who undergoes male-to-female surgery in late middle-age, in the midst of a successful career and marriage (with two children). jenny, who was born as james, is a very funny, dry narrator. through the grapevine, i had heard that the office bookclub's main complaint was that it wasn't a very 'writerly' book, but that is confusing to me because james boylan was a published author (3+ novels), before becoming jenny. hmm. anyway, a quick read, not perfect, but very enjoyable for my empty afternoon.
4. inside the victorian home: a portrait of domestic life in victorian england, by judith flanders. i am currently reading this book, and if you are at all fascinated by the inner workings of domestic life in centuries past, as i am, this book is an orgy of details. it deals with victorian family life in the middle classes, who mainly lived in newly built 'terraced' homes in london suburbs (the closest american equivalent is row houses, but it's not quite the same, picture long rows of these or these). judith flanders is very witty, and her footnotes are full of great anecdotes and asides. this is my favorite so far:
5. not a book, but a new thing in our house: our spitty kitchen sink faucet recently aggravated me to the point where i was forced to unscrew the head of the faucet, to check if the washer was clogged or something. in true hehehe-i-can-make-a-bong-with-this-apple fashion, kirk and i both stood over the sink while i unscrewed it, curious to see what was inside. a lovely vintage metal screen in good condition, blocked by a weird plastic washer thingy. not cool. i screwed the faucet head back on, sans plastic doohickey, and now it gives us a very luscious, heavy stream of un-aerated water. i had not realized that all modern sinks aerate the water, which decreases water pressure a little and saves a lot of water. i know this is terrible for water conservation, but it is truly lovely to hold your hand under a stream of unaerated water. it is heavier, it is tastier in the glass, it is prettier and more musical in the sink. i <3 plumbing experiments.
1. the rule of four, by ian caldwell and dustin thomason. review in a nutshell: please do not waste your money buying this book. slightly extended review: it is awful. it is a transparent plot, with little or no focus on the hypnerotomachia poliphili (“poliphilo’s struggle for love in a dream”), upon which it purports to rest its plot, and it is otherwise a tiresome work of nostalgic princeton-undergraduate-life
2. the little black book of stories, by a.s. byatt. kirk bought this for me, which is lovely because i never think to buy books of short stories for myself, but i usually enjoy them. my favorites by far were 'a stone woman', about a woman who slowly turns to stone, and 'raw material', which contains a long story-within-a-story, about laundry day in a turn-of-the-century house. (my love of antique methods of laundry & general housekeeping will come up later, see #4.) a small book, perfect for the subway, and beautifully written. very good if, like me, you fall asleep at night easily and need a (physically) light-weight book which you can read & fall asleep to, often, without losing the plot of the story entirely.
3. she's not there, by jennifer finney boylan. this book i read very quickly, at work on a very boring afternoon, because someone happened to have it lying around, and the office bookclub had read it recently. it is an autobiography about a colby college professor who undergoes male-to-female surgery in late middle-age, in the midst of a successful career and marriage (with two children). jenny, who was born as james, is a very funny, dry narrator. through the grapevine, i had heard that the office bookclub's main complaint was that it wasn't a very 'writerly' book, but that is confusing to me because james boylan was a published author (3+ novels), before becoming jenny. hmm. anyway, a quick read, not perfect, but very enjoyable for my empty afternoon.
4. inside the victorian home: a portrait of domestic life in victorian england, by judith flanders. i am currently reading this book, and if you are at all fascinated by the inner workings of domestic life in centuries past, as i am, this book is an orgy of details. it deals with victorian family life in the middle classes, who mainly lived in newly built 'terraced' homes in london suburbs (the closest american equivalent is row houses, but it's not quite the same, picture long rows of these or these). judith flanders is very witty, and her footnotes are full of great anecdotes and asides. this is my favorite so far:
It has been suggested I am more interested in S-bends [a plumbing and sanitation innovation] than I am in sex. For the purposes of social history this is so, and I do not plan to discuss sex at all. There is a great deal to say on the little we know about the Victorians' attitude toward sex, but I am not the person to say it. (For S-bends, however, see pp. 329-31.)and i am here to tell you, the s-bends are every bit as fascinating as she says they are. who knew the history of plumbing was so rich? each chapter of the book deals with a different room of the house, moving generally from birth to death, from the nursery to the sickroom. this is a big, heavy book, $35, but worth every penny. it is very thorough, well-written, and engaging. despite having lots of very pressing demands on my time at home (the legend of zelda: four swords adventures), i find myself drawn back to this book compulsively. while reading it, i am occasionally overtaken by a fit of victorian, a place-for-everything-even-if-it-kills-you pique, and must run around the room putting things away in drawers, etcetera. if you are a little crazed about thorough cleaning, i dare you to read this book and feel clean. we don't know clean. we have never plunged our bare arms up to the elbows in boiling water infused with poisonous chemicals, and we have never dealt with 'blacks' (little flakes of soot from fires & anthracite coal). i love dirty, lived-in, complex, contradictory history like this.
5. not a book, but a new thing in our house: our spitty kitchen sink faucet recently aggravated me to the point where i was forced to unscrew the head of the faucet, to check if the washer was clogged or something. in true hehehe-i-can-make-a-bong-with-this-apple fashion, kirk and i both stood over the sink while i unscrewed it, curious to see what was inside. a lovely vintage metal screen in good condition, blocked by a weird plastic washer thingy. not cool. i screwed the faucet head back on, sans plastic doohickey, and now it gives us a very luscious, heavy stream of un-aerated water. i had not realized that all modern sinks aerate the water, which decreases water pressure a little and saves a lot of water. i know this is terrible for water conservation, but it is truly lovely to hold your hand under a stream of unaerated water. it is heavier, it is tastier in the glass, it is prettier and more musical in the sink. i <3 plumbing experiments.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-06-14 11:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-14 01:52 pm (UTC)(also--this entry is so long---i am glad you took the time to read it! thank you :))
no subject
Date: 2004-06-14 02:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-15 07:47 am (UTC)this is a rather banal comment, i know.
no subject
Date: 2004-06-15 08:25 am (UTC)(thanks for the comment---i'm just glad someone else waded through such a long entry.)
no subject
Date: 2004-06-15 08:27 am (UTC)i failed.
(i like reading about books... especially being in a place where i have a limited access to my native language, i'm really devouring books.)
no subject
Date: 2004-06-15 08:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-15 09:02 am (UTC)i don't tend to get mistaken for icelandic. i look far too american. i tried to "fit in" over the winter, but i've given up and accepted my identity as a crazy american.
also, yes, iceland has marvelous bathtubs.