Entry tags:
Wednesday Reading meme (kinda late)
I always intend to do this ...
What are you currently reading?
Dillinger in Hollywood by John Sayles - collection of short stories (contemporary litfic). Really fun and I'm enjoying it a lot! He has a great ear for capturing character voices and portraying a diverse array of communities, most of which I assume he doesn't belong to - so, you know, grain of salt on the authenticity of the portrayals, but he's a good storyteller. My favorite story in the book so far dealt with a racially mixed group of women on a bus to visit their husband/boyfriends/sons in prison, and the friendships & social bonding between the women contrasted with the racially/socially stratified prison world of their men. Other stories in the book (of the ones I've read so far) deal with a Hollywood nursing home, a Nantucket-area family torn apart by their generations-long search for pirate treasure, and a group of female shrimp peelers in New Orleans.
What did you recently finish reading?
61 Hours by Lee Child, latest in the Jack Reacher suspense novels that my husband and I have been plowing through, but I think this one might have cured me of reading any more of them for a while, because the ending REALLY did not play fair with the reader and it annoyed the heck out of me. Specifically it is implied that the hero survived the climactic battle (well, implied by the existence of another book) while definitively giving him no way to survive. I mean, he would have had to be invulnerable and/or a superhero to survive what happened to him in this book. Basically he got blown up by a fuel tank explosion at the bottom of a 200-foot mine shaft - WE SAW THIS HAPPEN IN THE BOOK - while soaked in diesel fuel and lacking a coat, miles from any town in South Dakota in a -30 degree blizzard. And it is definitively established in the last chapter that there are no vehicles nearby that he could have used to escape, and the area was searched and no survivors were found. Husband & I joked that he got blown a thousand feet in the air and landed in the burn ward at the nearest hospital, but seriously, there isn't even a hook set in this novel that could have allowed him to escape. It's gone beyond the general goofball hero badassery of this series and into straight-up RIDICULOUS.
What do you think you'll read next?
I'm not sure! Maybe I'll switch to nonfiction for awhile. I have The Horse and the Wheel sitting on my to-read pile (Indo-Europeans!) and also have FBI by Ronald Kessler (thanks to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
magistrate's rec) sitting around for law-enforcement writing background.
What are you currently reading?
Dillinger in Hollywood by John Sayles - collection of short stories (contemporary litfic). Really fun and I'm enjoying it a lot! He has a great ear for capturing character voices and portraying a diverse array of communities, most of which I assume he doesn't belong to - so, you know, grain of salt on the authenticity of the portrayals, but he's a good storyteller. My favorite story in the book so far dealt with a racially mixed group of women on a bus to visit their husband/boyfriends/sons in prison, and the friendships & social bonding between the women contrasted with the racially/socially stratified prison world of their men. Other stories in the book (of the ones I've read so far) deal with a Hollywood nursing home, a Nantucket-area family torn apart by their generations-long search for pirate treasure, and a group of female shrimp peelers in New Orleans.
What did you recently finish reading?
61 Hours by Lee Child, latest in the Jack Reacher suspense novels that my husband and I have been plowing through, but I think this one might have cured me of reading any more of them for a while, because the ending REALLY did not play fair with the reader and it annoyed the heck out of me. Specifically it is implied that the hero survived the climactic battle (well, implied by the existence of another book) while definitively giving him no way to survive. I mean, he would have had to be invulnerable and/or a superhero to survive what happened to him in this book. Basically he got blown up by a fuel tank explosion at the bottom of a 200-foot mine shaft - WE SAW THIS HAPPEN IN THE BOOK - while soaked in diesel fuel and lacking a coat, miles from any town in South Dakota in a -30 degree blizzard. And it is definitively established in the last chapter that there are no vehicles nearby that he could have used to escape, and the area was searched and no survivors were found. Husband & I joked that he got blown a thousand feet in the air and landed in the burn ward at the nearest hospital, but seriously, there isn't even a hook set in this novel that could have allowed him to escape. It's gone beyond the general goofball hero badassery of this series and into straight-up RIDICULOUS.
What do you think you'll read next?
I'm not sure! Maybe I'll switch to nonfiction for awhile. I have The Horse and the Wheel sitting on my to-read pile (Indo-Europeans!) and also have FBI by Ronald Kessler (thanks to
magistrate's rec) sitting around for law-enforcement writing background.