Odds Against (Dick Francis)
Feb. 15th, 2015 10:58 pmPosting, posting ... You know, I still haven't given up on answering the December meme questions! (This is, however, EXACTLY why I always add a caveat that I may not get around to it.) One of the things I've been doing this year is severely cutting back on my Internet time ... which is, to my surprise, has turned out to be both a) easier, and b) more beneficial than I thought it was going to be. I've been super productive this month! On the other hand, I do want to get back into posting more.
What I have been doing is reading a lot. In lieu of Internet or TV, my main form of recreation this year has been reading, and I've probably read more books so far this year than in the entire previous year, which is a surprisingly nice feeling. I used to be a book-a-day bibliophile, but over the last few years, I've kind of drifted away; I've ended up doing other things (wasting time on Tumblr, say, or mainlining whole seasons of TV shows) as my "turn off my brain and let my mental wheels spin" activity. Not that I stopped reading (my idea of reading "not much" is probably some people's idea of reading a lot) but it wasn't something I did all the time. Truth be told, most of my fiction reading was fanfic the last couple of years.
But this year I've been reading a bunch, in part because I need more recreational activities that involve getting away from the computer (and also, I'm trying to go to bed earlier, so shutting down the computer and taking a book to bed is one way of achieving that). The most recent thing on the "done read" pile is one that![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rachelmanija recommended -- Odds Against, the first of Dick Francis's Sid Halley books -- and I thoroughly loved it. I vaguely recall reading several of Francis's novels back when I was a teenager, but I was a little disconcerted to realize that I'd never actually caught on that he's British. Within the first few pages of this book I got one of those slightly unnerving perspective shifts when you realize that you've been remembering something wrong all those years, because I had somehow come away from my teen years with the idea that his books were mostly set in US horse racing and they're ... really obviously not.
Anyway, I enjoyed it a lot. I love the action/suspense/mystery genres in general, but a lot of the older generation(s) of genre fiction come with a sort of background level of misogyny that is distracting -- not necessarily a dealbreaker, but frustrating in an otherwise well-written book -- so I was pleasantly surprised to find that was refreshingly absent here, at least to my eyes. Also, I liked the book's handling of disability and just really liked the characters, generally. (Okay, the book does have a very textual S&M EQUALS EVIL thematic element which is kind of annoying. But otherwise it was a whole lot more ... well ... I dunno what I'm going for here -- enlightened? Emotionally deeper? Something, anyway, that I don't generally expect from 1960s thrillers.)
I vaguely remember that the rec came with some kind of caveat about the rest of the series, but unfortunately I can't remember now if it was "the rest of the books are not that great, so don't get your hopes up" or "FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON'T READ THE REST OF THE SERIES". However, the library has several more of them, so I think I might be making a trip over there soon.
( A couple more things about the book, moderately spoilery )
What I have been doing is reading a lot. In lieu of Internet or TV, my main form of recreation this year has been reading, and I've probably read more books so far this year than in the entire previous year, which is a surprisingly nice feeling. I used to be a book-a-day bibliophile, but over the last few years, I've kind of drifted away; I've ended up doing other things (wasting time on Tumblr, say, or mainlining whole seasons of TV shows) as my "turn off my brain and let my mental wheels spin" activity. Not that I stopped reading (my idea of reading "not much" is probably some people's idea of reading a lot) but it wasn't something I did all the time. Truth be told, most of my fiction reading was fanfic the last couple of years.
But this year I've been reading a bunch, in part because I need more recreational activities that involve getting away from the computer (and also, I'm trying to go to bed earlier, so shutting down the computer and taking a book to bed is one way of achieving that). The most recent thing on the "done read" pile is one that
rachelmanija recommended -- Odds Against, the first of Dick Francis's Sid Halley books -- and I thoroughly loved it. I vaguely recall reading several of Francis's novels back when I was a teenager, but I was a little disconcerted to realize that I'd never actually caught on that he's British. Within the first few pages of this book I got one of those slightly unnerving perspective shifts when you realize that you've been remembering something wrong all those years, because I had somehow come away from my teen years with the idea that his books were mostly set in US horse racing and they're ... really obviously not.Anyway, I enjoyed it a lot. I love the action/suspense/mystery genres in general, but a lot of the older generation(s) of genre fiction come with a sort of background level of misogyny that is distracting -- not necessarily a dealbreaker, but frustrating in an otherwise well-written book -- so I was pleasantly surprised to find that was refreshingly absent here, at least to my eyes. Also, I liked the book's handling of disability and just really liked the characters, generally. (Okay, the book does have a very textual S&M EQUALS EVIL thematic element which is kind of annoying. But otherwise it was a whole lot more ... well ... I dunno what I'm going for here -- enlightened? Emotionally deeper? Something, anyway, that I don't generally expect from 1960s thrillers.)
I vaguely remember that the rec came with some kind of caveat about the rest of the series, but unfortunately I can't remember now if it was "the rest of the books are not that great, so don't get your hopes up" or "FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON'T READ THE REST OF THE SERIES". However, the library has several more of them, so I think I might be making a trip over there soon.
( A couple more things about the book, moderately spoilery )