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Wednesday reading — peacocks and pigeons
Mar. 12th, 2014 10:26 pmOh yeah, it's Wednesday, and that means books.
What I've been reading
I read Figure Skating: A History, because I am interested in the history of figure skating. Unfortunately, it was kind of a poorly assembled infodump. At least some of the pictures were quite pretty?
I read What Makes This Book So Great, which is just a collection of Jo Walton's Tor.com columns, but easier to flip through, especially since I can never work out how to navigate that site by contributer at all. A couple of the books I had read since the columns were published, and a few more got added to my to-read list.
I read, or possibly reread, The Winter of the Birds, because I was looking for another non-Bagthorpe Cresswell book that my library didn't have and I had to ILL, but they did have this one and I'm not sure if I read it before or not. I can't find a picture of the cover their copy has anywhere on the internet, but it's really striking; I may have to scan it before I return it and see if I can put it on Goodreads somehow, although it still won't have the same effect with the silver foil. Anyway, like the other non-Bagthorpe Cresswell I have read, it's a very odd book; it's one of the few books I can think of that asserts a definite fantastic element where I feel that it only works if that thing is just some kind of metaphor and doesn't actually exist. And yet, for all that, the description of the steel birds that come down on wires is fantastically creepy. I think maybe I did read it when I was younger and was resistant to the fact that it is actually about combatting alienation in post-war Britain and the birds are a metaphor, because like I said, I don't generally care for books where the magic is a metaphor.
What I've been reading
I read Figure Skating: A History, because I am interested in the history of figure skating. Unfortunately, it was kind of a poorly assembled infodump. At least some of the pictures were quite pretty?
I read What Makes This Book So Great, which is just a collection of Jo Walton's Tor.com columns, but easier to flip through, especially since I can never work out how to navigate that site by contributer at all. A couple of the books I had read since the columns were published, and a few more got added to my to-read list.
I read, or possibly reread, The Winter of the Birds, because I was looking for another non-Bagthorpe Cresswell book that my library didn't have and I had to ILL, but they did have this one and I'm not sure if I read it before or not. I can't find a picture of the cover their copy has anywhere on the internet, but it's really striking; I may have to scan it before I return it and see if I can put it on Goodreads somehow, although it still won't have the same effect with the silver foil. Anyway, like the other non-Bagthorpe Cresswell I have read, it's a very odd book; it's one of the few books I can think of that asserts a definite fantastic element where I feel that it only works if that thing is just some kind of metaphor and doesn't actually exist. And yet, for all that, the description of the steel birds that come down on wires is fantastically creepy. I think maybe I did read it when I was younger and was resistant to the fact that it is actually about combatting alienation in post-war Britain and the birds are a metaphor, because like I said, I don't generally care for books where the magic is a metaphor.
