More recent reading
Feb. 6th, 2007 01:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunrabOK, let's see. The Cymry Ring by Michael Allen Dymmoch. I had previously read one of Dymmoch's books, Murder in West Wheeling, a humorous mystery, and I guess I expected another similar. Instead, what I got was time travel. Not terribly SF, since the mechanism by which the time travel works is never explained - just, her dad has a time travel machine, she uses it, poof it gets blown up, and that's all we ever hear about it. But an interesting story anyway; our protagonists travel back to Wales in Roman/Boudiccan times.
In the Company of Books; Literature And Its "Classes" in Nineteenth-century America by Sarah Wadsworth. Obviously started its life as someone's doctoral dissertation. Basically an explanation of how the market for fiction came to be segmented out into books for adults vs. books for children, books for women different from books for men, books for boys different from books for girls, books for the lower economic clases vs. books for the elite, and books for rural families vs. books for urban readers. Before the 1800's there really wasn't any such market segmentation. Examinations of Louisa May Alcott's specific role as a writer of "girls books" and how the marketing of such was being developed, and Samuel Clemens' ambivalence about being typed as a writer of "boys books." Having the brief recaps of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn here turned out to be useful, because I hadn't reread those since I read them once as a kid - I never liked them that much. Nonetheless, the refresher turned out to be useful for another book I read:
A Fictional History of the United States (with Huge Chunks Missing) by T Cooper and Adam Mansbach. A title which is hugely misleading, because although the book has 20 short pieces, not all of them are stories, or even fiction, some of them are only related to history because they're collected in a book that claims to be US history and otherwise nobody would think the stories were about US history. Certainly the David Rees comic isn't a story. OTOH, the story which purports to be the further adventures of Huck Finn in New Orleans was hysterically funny, and I wouldn't have appreciated it nearly as much had I not been reminded just previously of some of the details of the original. The story about a Russian immigrant girl in the early 20th century is touching. Most of the stories, however, were way too postmodern for my taste.
Air America: The Playbook with an intro by Al Franken, is mostly transcripts from the radio shows: interviews, excerpts from the Creep of the Week feature, etc. Funny in spots, but a lot of this worked much better on air than it does as reading.
Other than that, a bunch of magazines, as usual.
In the Company of Books; Literature And Its "Classes" in Nineteenth-century America by Sarah Wadsworth. Obviously started its life as someone's doctoral dissertation. Basically an explanation of how the market for fiction came to be segmented out into books for adults vs. books for children, books for women different from books for men, books for boys different from books for girls, books for the lower economic clases vs. books for the elite, and books for rural families vs. books for urban readers. Before the 1800's there really wasn't any such market segmentation. Examinations of Louisa May Alcott's specific role as a writer of "girls books" and how the marketing of such was being developed, and Samuel Clemens' ambivalence about being typed as a writer of "boys books." Having the brief recaps of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn here turned out to be useful, because I hadn't reread those since I read them once as a kid - I never liked them that much. Nonetheless, the refresher turned out to be useful for another book I read:
A Fictional History of the United States (with Huge Chunks Missing) by T Cooper and Adam Mansbach. A title which is hugely misleading, because although the book has 20 short pieces, not all of them are stories, or even fiction, some of them are only related to history because they're collected in a book that claims to be US history and otherwise nobody would think the stories were about US history. Certainly the David Rees comic isn't a story. OTOH, the story which purports to be the further adventures of Huck Finn in New Orleans was hysterically funny, and I wouldn't have appreciated it nearly as much had I not been reminded just previously of some of the details of the original. The story about a Russian immigrant girl in the early 20th century is touching. Most of the stories, however, were way too postmodern for my taste.
Air America: The Playbook with an intro by Al Franken, is mostly transcripts from the radio shows: interviews, excerpts from the Creep of the Week feature, etc. Funny in spots, but a lot of this worked much better on air than it does as reading.
Other than that, a bunch of magazines, as usual.
