Sunday Salon: the Exhausted Post

My fibro has been attacking pretty relentlessly all week; in fact, for three days I couldn’t even read (I’m so glad I had pre-scheduled the whole week of blogging!). It’s very depressing to be stuck at home, laying around all day, and not be able to enjoy it with a good book! Anyway, yesterday I was able to start reading again, although I could only go for trade paperbacks (hardcovers and mass market were too difficult to keep open with only one arm working). So rather than reading any of the books under my ‘Currently Reading’ sidebar, I ended up racing through almost three random (i.e.-nonchallenge) books.

I’m not really sure which books I read this week and which ones I read last week, since I skipped Sunday Salon, so I’m going to guess this week started with M.J. Rose’s The Memorist. I’ve already published my review: essentially I thought it was a fun, fluffy thriller.

Also early in the week, I finished up a non-fiction book I’ve been working on for awhile: City of Orangesby Adam LeBor. It was my first World Citizen Challenge read, and it was excellent! LeBor uses the history of Jaffa (now part of Tel Aviv, Israel) to examine the Israeli-Palestine relationship from the 1920s to a few years ago. I thought it was well-balanced, informative, and well-written; you’ll be getting a full review later. :)

After that, I turned to Alberto Manguel’s The Library at Night. I expected it to be a treat, and it definitely was. Each of the fifteen chapters read like a mini-essay on various aspects of libraries, and since it’s Manguel you know the writing was incredibly intelligent and filled with book-love. I read this for the Dewey Decimal challenge, and as I mentioned a couple weeks ago, I’ll be reviewing this one and Rereadings together.

Then there was the drought until yesterday, when I read two books and almost finished a third! I got Blonde Like Me by Natalia Ilyin from the library on a whim; its subtitle The Roots of Blonde Myth in Our Cultureappealed to me, since I’m a natural (dark) blonde. It’s a slim book-less than 200 pages-and it’s mainly a memoir, mixed with scholarly analysis of the symbols of blondes. Ilyin ‘profiles’ (often using Greek mythology) various types of blondes, as well as referencing many blondes from American culture (Martha Stewart, Madonna, and of course Marilyn Monroe). The intellectual look at why women choose to dye their hair blonde (in the beginning Ilyin contends there are almost no natural blondes, but what she means is natural platinum blondes) felt not-fully-fleshed out, but these passages were short compared to Ilyin’s reminisces of her own life as a blonde. She’s had a very interesting life-her father was a Russian emigre turned diplomat, her mother a Southerner who sent her to modelling school so that Ilyin could learn how to own her 6’2″ height, and she tells a story well. This book is really fun as long as you don’t expect a strong scholarly case.

Most of the books I checked out from the library are hardcover, but fortunately The Innkeeper’s Song by Peter Beagle was in trade paperback! This is my third Beagle book, and while I didn’t love it as much as Tamsin and A Fine and Private Place, it was still good. Unlike those two, which are both about the intersection of ghosts with our world, The Innkeeper’s Song is high fantasy. Beagle created his own world, which like a lot of high fantasy seems a little bit like an idealised Middle Ages plus magic, and brought disparate characters together at an inn to face down evil. The plot is too complicated to summarise, and there are so many characters it’d be difficult to look at them all in such a brief review, but I will say that this one just wasn’t as incredible as the other two I read. Maybe it’s that high fantasy doesn’t suit me as much as urban anymore, maybe it’s that I enjoy reading about ghosts more than about wizards, I don’t know. Of course, it was still good, and I’d recommend it (I loved the character of the fox-he had that special Beagle touch), but if you’ve never read Beagle before I wouldn’t start here.

Finally, I’m almost done with From a Whisper to a Scream by Charles de Lint, another trade paperback. It’s darker than the other de Lint books I’ve read (which makes sense, since de Lint considers it to be horror and originally published it under a pen name), but it’s still set in Newford (in the preface, I learned it was actually the first full-length Newford novel) and has that de Lint magical touch. I’m really enjoying it!

As for the books that I was in the middle of, but can’t read right now because of my stupid arm, just look to the right to find out how I feel about them. :) I’m tired, so I’m going to round this up. But I’m sorry that I haven’t been commenting much around the blogosphere this week-hopefully I’ll start feeling better soon. I’ve been reading your posts, though!