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Sunday, September 07, 2008

Books for -- man, what *was* last month? Oh yeah. August.

It's just as well that I forgot until 11:30 pm that I needed to make bread for communion tomorrow (the only breads you can find unsliced for purchase in town are long loaves of French bread, which don't fit on the platters, and round loaves of King's Hawaiian, which I personally loathe), because while I was working on the Irish soda bread, which I haven't made in YEARS, I remembered that I hadn't shifted the laundry either, and that waking up tomorrow morning to find nearly all the clothes we wanted to wear sitting in a wet lump in the washing machine would not get our Sunday off to a cheerful start.

Then I had the baking time to fill in, and I thought, hey, I can write a books post! Or I can work on the Super Secret Stealth Surprise knitting project! I could hand-wash my hand-washables! I could watch a TV show on hulu.com! I could get started on next week's reading for Comm-05! All of a sudden 25 minutes -- oops, make that 20 now -- are not enough for everything, and can I stay up all night again? (I guess it's also a good thing that I did get in a 3-hour nap this afternoon, after having under four hours of sleep after the observatory trip.)

I guess I'll just content myself with doing the books post and save everything else for tomorrow. Maybe.

OK, so. Books. This is easy. I re-read some Austen (S&S and P&P -- am saving the delicious Persuasion for last; I wonder if I could talk T into reading it to me, just for variety? I wonder how long that would last before I had to, um, make him stop?), and I read a new book by Joanna Trollope called Friday Nights, which falls into the (very full) "not badly done but I'm not going to go around recommending it to everyone" 2.5-3.5 category. Trollope is a very good writer most of the time from a technical standpoint -- her dialogue rings true, her characters do what real people would do, her settings are tangible without being over-discussed -- but there was something a little, well, boring, about this book. It was almost like a creative writing exercise; I can see the handout now. "Create half a dozen or so women friends, each unique and of varying ages. Explain how they came to be friends. Give each character a rich past and/or a compelling issue that needs resolution. Now throw in a variable, e.g. a man, a death, a world event [Trollope chose "a man"], and show what happens to the dynamics of the group as a result in 70,000 words or less. Due at the end of term." She would have earned her A, no question, but the borderline formulaic-ness of the story turned me off a bit. Still worth a read, especially if you've liked her other stuff.

Perfect; there's the timer. Gah, the wire rack's in the dishwasher, dirty. My planning lacks. But then we all knew that.

Comments

Posted by: Angela at September 7, 2008 07:37 AM

Posted by: Beck at September 11, 2008 10:21 AM

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