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mm... books...
Jun. 27th, 2003 05:28 pmI spent almost an hour this morning wandering around the Waterstone's in Oxford, trying to decide what I wanted to take on holiday with me. It has to be thick, paperback and a slow read. Penguin classics are the best for this, because they're also cheap and light--my two most successful holiday books were War and Peace and Moby Dick. Will this be the summer that I finally read Cervantes or Rabelais? Probably not, but Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy have been on my reading list for about five years now, and would be appropriate to a trip to Central Italy. And then there are the modern options (if only Oryx and Crake were out in paperback--it would be perfect). I considered OotP, but I'd race through it and then have to lug it around for two weeks.
I also noticed a collection entitled The Lymond Poetry, assembled and edited by Dorothy Dunnett before her death. Why did no one tell me about this earlier? I haven't purchased it, but I did read through it--many of them were pieces I already knew in their entirety, because I'm obsessive that way, but there were some pleasant surprises as well, where having the whole poem suddenly illuminated a character's mindset in a whole new way. Poems not in English were translated, too.
I just finished Connie Willis' Doomsday Book. I'd been warned that it was very unlike To Say Nothing of the Dog, but that's an understatement. I found it a harrowing read, as I suppose you'd expect for a book which concerns epidemics--one feels the characters' helplessness very strongly, both in the past and in the future sections. I find that Willis' knowledge of Oxford has strange holes in it: she'll get one thing perfectly right (the ongoing feud between modernists and medievalists in the History Faculty), and then miss something dreadfully obvious (like the fact that you can't see the Balliol Senior Common Room from the front gate, unless I misread that). And why, why does her future contain no mobile phones?
I also noticed a collection entitled The Lymond Poetry, assembled and edited by Dorothy Dunnett before her death. Why did no one tell me about this earlier? I haven't purchased it, but I did read through it--many of them were pieces I already knew in their entirety, because I'm obsessive that way, but there were some pleasant surprises as well, where having the whole poem suddenly illuminated a character's mindset in a whole new way. Poems not in English were translated, too.
I just finished Connie Willis' Doomsday Book. I'd been warned that it was very unlike To Say Nothing of the Dog, but that's an understatement. I found it a harrowing read, as I suppose you'd expect for a book which concerns epidemics--one feels the characters' helplessness very strongly, both in the past and in the future sections. I find that Willis' knowledge of Oxford has strange holes in it: she'll get one thing perfectly right (the ongoing feud between modernists and medievalists in the History Faculty), and then miss something dreadfully obvious (like the fact that you can't see the Balliol Senior Common Room from the front gate, unless I misread that). And why, why does her future contain no mobile phones?
