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Reading Wednesday: Happy Birthday Edition
Aug. 7th, 2013 08:23 pmToday is G.'s birthday. Happy birthday!
This week I read Imogen Binnie's Nevada. Like many ostensible road trip novels I've read recently, it takes half the book to get on the road. And then doesn't spend any time *on* the road, really. Which is fine, because what's happening instead is interesting enough, lots of cute bits blah blah blah, although I felt the first section dragged a bit here and there. The book is basically a big parabola and a small parabola (at least as I read it), which intersect briefly in, well, Nevada.
After that I started Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s. One of the interesting choices this book makes is to focus the bulk of the book on four lesser-known but important blues women: Sippie Wallace, Victoria Spivey, Alberta Hunter and Edith Wilson. The author tells us that she chose these four women in part because they were still alive when she started her research and thus could provide first-person accounts of their experiences. !!! Two had passed by the time it was published and the book is dedicated to their memories.
What's next? No clue.
Meanwhile, my father wants to discuss Proust with me. We had a rousing discussion of Moby Dick, and then I eviscerated a) Heart of Darkness and b) the entire Western canon for him over the course of an hour phone call.
Also we contemplated together what Apocalypse Now might look like if told from the POV of the Playboy Bunnies.
This week I read Imogen Binnie's Nevada. Like many ostensible road trip novels I've read recently, it takes half the book to get on the road. And then doesn't spend any time *on* the road, really. Which is fine, because what's happening instead is interesting enough, lots of cute bits blah blah blah, although I felt the first section dragged a bit here and there. The book is basically a big parabola and a small parabola (at least as I read it), which intersect briefly in, well, Nevada.
After that I started Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s. One of the interesting choices this book makes is to focus the bulk of the book on four lesser-known but important blues women: Sippie Wallace, Victoria Spivey, Alberta Hunter and Edith Wilson. The author tells us that she chose these four women in part because they were still alive when she started her research and thus could provide first-person accounts of their experiences. !!! Two had passed by the time it was published and the book is dedicated to their memories.
What's next? No clue.
Meanwhile, my father wants to discuss Proust with me. We had a rousing discussion of Moby Dick, and then I eviscerated a) Heart of Darkness and b) the entire Western canon for him over the course of an hour phone call.
Also we contemplated together what Apocalypse Now might look like if told from the POV of the Playboy Bunnies.
