What We're Reading

JAY'S UPDATE: 01 November 2012

So, Nik and I are writing two books - he’s taking the lead on the crime thriller (working title: Holding Company) while I start on a middle grade scifi novel (working title: none). Progress on both seems to be a little sluggish lately, what with the summer holidays long gone, and for me, school and work and life taking over my brain.

To jumpstart things again, I have stack of middle grade fiction scattered throughout the house for a quick read here and there. 

Here’s what’s on top:

This Book is Not Good For You (Pseudonymous Bosch): I’m reading this with my oldest son and it’s slow-going. (Just received an overdue notice today from the local library, oops! Was apparently due a month ago.) We only read a few chapters a week, partly because he has at least two other books for school each week and partly because I just don’t find it all that captivating so we end up doing other stuff in the evenings, like playing Minecraft and watching inappropriate Smosh videos on YouTube.

The story itself is okay, a kids-solving-crime kind of thing, and the footnotes and author interjections are a hoot. And to be fair, my son thinks it’s hilarious. But for me, it’s just not one of those kids books that are equally entertaining for adults - not bad, by any means, just okay. 

On the other hand:

The Graveyard Book (Neil Gaiman): Amazing. Wonderful. Don’t want to put it down. One of those rare kids books that are completely enjoyable for an adult to read. Love it, love it, love it.

By the way, there’s a new tumblr site where people post photos of themselves reading Neil’s books in the bathtub (don’t worry, totally SFW!). Here’s the link - funny stuff!:

http://bathbookneil.tumblr.com

And since I’m off on a Neil Gaiman tangent at the moment, did you know he’s written another Doctor Who script??

But back to my book list:

Artemis Fowl (Eoin Colfer): Took me a couple of chapters to get into, but now totally hooked. Colfer does an amazing job developing his characters and the action is non-stop. Really enjoying this one, will re-read with my son after we get through the Bosch book.






Magyk - Book One (Angie Sage): Just a few pages in so far. Not something I’d ordinarily pick up, but I think I’ll like it.









And for a change of pace and because I have a penchant for post-apocalyptic fiction:

School’s Out Forever (Scott K. Andrews): I picked this up on a whim because I liked the picture on the front cover and the quote on the back:

“After the world died we all sort of drifted back to school. After all, where else was there to go”

Two chapters in and I had to force myself to put it down. Could happily spend the day reading it cover-to-cover.

Jay: Okay, I'll start. When I was a student at Ohio State (go Bucks!), I wandered into the campus bookstore one day and was utterly amazed to find Anaïs Nin's Delta of Venus and Little Birds displayed prominently on the front book rack for all to see. Both had the word "erotica" plastered squarely across their front covers and no one seemed to find it shocking or scandalous or even embarassing.

Now it wasn't as though my best friend and I hadn't giggled over a dirty magazine or two back in high school, but we certainly hadn't marched into a bookstore to purchase our materials off the front rack (we swiped 'em from her brother). So to see erotica out there in the open, just like regular books, I was intrigued.

I purchased both books that day (blushing all shades of red) and still have them on my shelf, complete with their OSU bookstore stickers. It's been years since I've read either one, but in light of the current erotica craze, I've decided to re-read Delta of Venus. It was first published in 1969 and is one of the first books of American erotica authored by a female. Nin actually wrote these stories to keep her children clothed and fed, earning one dollar per page. She was instructed to "leave out the poetry" and focus on the sex, which she later felt stifled her female voice to some degree. 

I've also just picked up Connie Willis’s All Clear from the library. I discovered her this summer (thanks, Nik!) and have read four of her books over the past couple of months: To Say Nothing of the Dog, Blackout, The Doomsday Book, and Passage.  I didn’t really care for Passage – it’s a medical-based drama – but loved the time travel theme of the other three. I find it utterly refreshing to read scifi in which the story, rather than aliens and distant planets and lots of made-up words, takes center stage.

Nik: Just to kick off, Jay's post of what she is reading stirred memories. I found a copy of Anaïs Nin's Little Birds tucked away in my father's wardrobe rather more years ago than I care to enumerate (I was trawling for Christmas presents at the time). It was probably my first introduction to written erotica, and whilst the story probably had a happy ending at the time, I don't recall a word of the book.

A few months ago I was at the physiotherapist (my physio really fancies me, whenever I go she can't keep her hands off me...) and there was a magazine with a sketch of Nin by one of her lovers. Someone quite famous, but sorry, I can't remember who. But it turns out that Nin was a pioneer of the Hollywood-waxed look a good couple of decades early.

Anyway, as of today, I'm revisiting a book I last read just over twenty years ago: Harry Harrison's Return to Eden, the final book in his West of Eden trilogy. Harrison is a marvellous fantasy writer, from laugh-out-loud comedy through to pulp sci-fi. Eden is perhaps is masterwork, though I find some of his other writings more immediately enjoyable. It's a magnificent concept. What if continental drift and climate change (and the absence of a big asteroid) had worked such that humans had evolved in one part of planet Earth, and dinosaurs in another? The dinosaurs develop a technology based on selective and forced breeding for animals to give functions as diverse as weapons, boats, and microscopes; whilst the humans are at the hunter-gatherer stage.

Harrison creates cultures for the dinosaurs, as well as philosophical frameworks for their religious beliefs; the same for three separate tribes of humans; languages; and more. It has to stand as one of the most complete fantasy world creations in literature, and it's good reading, too.

Relevant to this blog is that it also has the sex lives of the dinosaurs, and one instance of inter-species sex. The books come with mini-encyclopaedias, and the dino one has a double entry for the sex: one brusque, birds-and-the-bees "and that is all there is to it"; and then the full works for the non-squeamish reader wanting to know more. What a laugh! I'll have to write a post about the attraction of offering both options in a book that contains sex...