It's a beautiful sunny day and I'll be off work for a week at the end of it. I choose not to dwell on the fact that I have a 3000 word paper to write at some point - better to focus on dinner out tonight, shoe shopping with my sister tomorrow, a trip to Aylesbury at the weekend, and of course the true meaning of Easter: lots of chocolate (symbolising the rebirth of nature in sugar form and the miraculous growth of my stomach). Book 28: The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan LethemThe fact that I felt so incredibly relieved when I finished this book yesterday is probably indicative... and yet, I did WANT to finish it, and I did enjoy parts of it. The race anxiety which is probably the central theme was described pretty compellingly, as were the geographical and social details of Brooklyn in the 1970s. BUT 1) the prose style tends to grate and get self-indulgent, with a lot of telling and not much showing, 2) the first half of the book uses such distanced third person narration that it feels like you're looking at Dylan (the main character) through a telescope, while in awkward contrast the second half switches to the perspective of adult Dylan himself, 3) Dylan becomes a music journalist and writes liner notes (some of which are thoughtfully 'reproduced' in full here). This is a personal gripe really, but I regard writing liner notes as one of the most boring, parasitic, pseudy, pointless activities in the music business and I don't want to read them in NOVELS. 09:35 . . .
Book 27: The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands by Dr Laura SchlessingerYou know when you read a book pretty much as a joke, and you're absolutely certain you'll disagree with everything in it and have a good laugh at the same time? Well, I WAS incredibly sceptical about dear Dr Laura, and yes I DID disagree with some of her more lunatic/conservative theories (namely that the women's movement was all about selfishness, promiscuity, greed and man-hating, oh and that whole Christianity thing...) BUT huh, it made me think a lot too. Nothing wrong with the concept that if you marry somebody, you should treat them with respect and not bitch about them to your female friends. Or that men's feelings and needs should be as important as women's. Maybe growing up with feminism DOES do some damage after all, at least if you can't distinguish between an oppressive patriarchal system and individual men, who by and large are NOT doing the oppressing. 16:13 . . .
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