Sunday, June 27, 2010

The Sunday Salon: Brief Reading Update

The Sunday Salon.com

What I finished:

Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman:  This week I finished a terrific Neil Gaiman short story collection, Smoke and Mirrors.  I didn't care for a few of the poems.  It wasn't because they weren't beautiful or structurally sound, its simply because I'm intensely picky about poems.  The stories were fabulous.  In this collection you'll meet trolls, an menacing Jack-in-the-Box, characters from Lovecraftian tales, distopias, murderers, werewolves, vampires, angels, and the end of the world.  My favorite tale is the last one in the collection: "Snow, Glass, Apples."  This fairy tale is in the same vein as one of Angela Carter's short stories from The Bloody Chamber.  In "Snow, Glass, Apples" Snow White is SCARY as hell in this tale.


Still Reading:

The Priory by Dorothy Whipple:  I've got about 150 pages left in this book and I really don't want it to be over.  In a way, the novel reminds me of something by Barbara Pym or, perhaps, I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith.  Conversely, the novel is much darker than I expected.  Nearly every female character is powerless in someway and finds herself relying on wits and chance to survive.

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas:  I fell like I'm nearing the end of this book, even though I still have over 300 pages left!

The Death of the Moth by Virginia Woolf:  to be honest, I haven't picked this book back up in the past week or two.  I really need to delve back in.  

Beginning this Week:  
 
The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession by David Grann
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

2 comments:

Andi said...

So many good books I'm really scared to read. Mostly by size as opposed to content. I WILL read Dumas one day!

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