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I have discovered --
-- that there is very little I enjoy as much as recommending books to people.
My mother is recovering from knee surgery, so she's lying around reading a lot.
Mum: *makes a face* This is a bit dry to read a lot of at once.
Me: What are you reading?
Mum: Peter Ackroyd's Chaucer.
Me: What the hell kind of recovering-from-surgery book is that? No. What else is on your pile?
Mum: Zadie Smith, Thomas Hardy...
Me: NO. NO. STAY THERE.CHOOSING SICKBED BOOKS: YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.
I ended up presenting her with Robert Dessaix's Corfu, Scarlett Thomas' The End Of Mr Y (remind me to do a long post about why this is the best book I've read all year, btw) and Tom Robbins' Half Asleep In Frog Pyjamas, all of which meet my criteria as fun and indulgent enough to be read while taking sick leave, but intelligent enough to make the cut in the intellectually tough environment of our house. (Seriously: only the strong survive. I have had to tuck my beloved Eddings and Feist books away in the spare room so that they don't get ravaged in the night by all the Dickens and Elliot and Fowles volumes on the main shelves. And I live in hope that one day the Annie Proulx books will reach the zenith of their snobbish homicidal urges, lean sideways on the shelf, and rip Matthew O'Reilly's books to shreds.)
For anyone who's interested, I'm currently reading Guy Gavriel Kay's The Darkest Road, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, a collection of Dylan Thomas poems, Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy and Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, the latter two of which are both weighty enough -- in both the literal sense and in terms of intellectual clout -- to seriously kick the arse of almost anything in the house.
Next on my pile: a book on the history of yellow fever sent to me by the lovely![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
liminalliz, a reread of Elizabeth Knox's Black Oxen (the best book I read LAST year), Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things and Philip Reeve's Starcross.
*stretches* Man, it feels good to babble about books every once in a while. I read a lot, but don't talk about it much. How about a variation on that 'stuff you don't know about me' meme: anything you'd like to know about me & books? Desert island lists? Authors I'd like to steal the brain of, Sylar-style or otherwise? Anything at all? Ask away.
My mother is recovering from knee surgery, so she's lying around reading a lot.
Mum: *makes a face* This is a bit dry to read a lot of at once.
Me: What are you reading?
Mum: Peter Ackroyd's Chaucer.
Me: What the hell kind of recovering-from-surgery book is that? No. What else is on your pile?
Mum: Zadie Smith, Thomas Hardy...
Me: NO. NO. STAY THERE.
I ended up presenting her with Robert Dessaix's Corfu, Scarlett Thomas' The End Of Mr Y (remind me to do a long post about why this is the best book I've read all year, btw) and Tom Robbins' Half Asleep In Frog Pyjamas, all of which meet my criteria as fun and indulgent enough to be read while taking sick leave, but intelligent enough to make the cut in the intellectually tough environment of our house. (Seriously: only the strong survive. I have had to tuck my beloved Eddings and Feist books away in the spare room so that they don't get ravaged in the night by all the Dickens and Elliot and Fowles volumes on the main shelves. And I live in hope that one day the Annie Proulx books will reach the zenith of their snobbish homicidal urges, lean sideways on the shelf, and rip Matthew O'Reilly's books to shreds.)
For anyone who's interested, I'm currently reading Guy Gavriel Kay's The Darkest Road, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, a collection of Dylan Thomas poems, Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy and Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, the latter two of which are both weighty enough -- in both the literal sense and in terms of intellectual clout -- to seriously kick the arse of almost anything in the house.
Next on my pile: a book on the history of yellow fever sent to me by the lovely
liminalliz, a reread of Elizabeth Knox's Black Oxen (the best book I read LAST year), Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things and Philip Reeve's Starcross.*stretches* Man, it feels good to babble about books every once in a while. I read a lot, but don't talk about it much. How about a variation on that 'stuff you don't know about me' meme: anything you'd like to know about me & books? Desert island lists? Authors I'd like to steal the brain of, Sylar-style or otherwise? Anything at all? Ask away.
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Both of those at once? Wow.. love the latter, really should get back to reading it at some point, I got lost about a third of the way in and set it aside, never quite made my way back as I keep getting waylaid by errant vampires and the odd French detective..
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The End Of Mr Y is an amazing, amazing book about imagination, consciousness, books, language, sex, identity, homeopathy, time travel, academia, subjective realities, and about a million other awesome things. My immediate reaction upon putting it down was 'holy shit', closely followed by 'I WISH I'D WRITTEN THAT'.
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One of my joys has been keeping a log of everything I've read for the last three years here (http://www.livejournal.com/users/sadcypress/35279.html). It's even mostly accurate! ;)
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I want a list of books that have made you think about something in a new/different way. Then the Sylar list.
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Lists to come later!
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But again, my fondness is based mostly on little Jude being me around the time that I read as much as I read. He's an awkward and serious child! He studies Latin for "fun"! He dreams of going to Oxford but then can't because there is no happiness in the world!
*cough*
I <3 all lists.
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