July Books
Penric's Demon/Penric and the Shaman/Penric's Fox/Penric's Mission/Testimony of Mute Things/Masquerade in Lodi/Mira's Last Dance - Clearly I am having a lot of fun here. These are all baseline good but some of them are VERY GOOD. Penric and the Shaman and Penric's Fox ownnnneddd assssss the whole way through. I love to see someone doing something that feels new and fun and LMB's fantasy is always surprising and exciting me. I am going to go back to her big scifi series because i JUST HATED the one I read but I like her enough now to give the next one a shot.
And No Birds Sang - I read Farley Mowat's Owls in the Family in grade school sometime and when my Dad requested this war memoir from him I was shocked. I have a tendency to forget that every man of that generation was shaped by his participation or inability to participate in the world war so of course that includes beloved Canadian writers too. This was very interesting and very sad, of course. The Italian front of WWII is something I would say I know virtually nothing about and in general I know very little about the shape of the war for Canadian troops. Mowat is a beautiful writer and a naturalist and both of those are used wonderfully here. He has some other memoirs about his experience in the army, especially how it affected his relationship with his Dad, that I'm very interested in tracking down.
Spoiled Milk - Fuck this was scary! Why did I read this??? Fun to start a book and immediately there's atmosphere and style and skill. A bit too much foreshadowing but that could also be me butting up against the conventions of a genre I don't really read. I don't like horror!!!! Great lesbians though.
Pick a Colour - Trying to read more Giller Prize winners, this is the most recent one. Interesting for me. I was very excited to read this because I heard that the main character is mean and funny and used to be a boxer but after reading the whole book I don't think I got a fuller or more interesting picture of those traits than I did from a single pull quote I saw about it. Weird book in the sense that I didn't feel like I was getting much out of it while I was reading it and it does a lot of that nebulous lesbianism that I see a lot of recently (smith college problem? someone is reading too many lit fic-y books about repressed lesbians and thinks it's a trend??) but then after I was done I thought about it a lot. Find myself remembering the feeling and the tone of the writing very clearly but still don't feel that warmly towards the experience of reading the book. Hard to say ultimately whether I liked it or not! But I do value the experience of having read it so thank you giller prize, that's one point for you.
The Crying of Lot 49 - Read for book club and hard to have anything but poisonously negative feelings about this. I am hoping that book club will help me derive some value from having read this book but those fuckers postponed again. A very talented writer but the experience of having him puppet a female character around was unbearable. Rape in Chapter 2 played for laughs, hard to come back from that and it's a book that I would say demands goodwill to get something out of.
