I just realized that I read a book for work on Tuesday night and forgot to put up a blog post. Slacker!! I can’t help feeling a little embarrassed that I read fantasy and sci-fi, also known as speculative fiction.
The book I read for work last night kicked off with such promise. I was reminded of books such as A Secret History, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, and House of Leaves. I love books that combine gothic atmosphere, horror elements, and a story-within-a-story that might be more than just a story. Books that are occult, in the sense that they imply access to a hidden meaning if the reader can master the secret language that the author is employing beyond words. This particular book…
My reading job started up again today. I vet to-be-published manuscripts, and my employers must like me because they generally give me stuff I’m excited to read. So, in keeping with my post-per-book formula, here is a blog post to go with the book I finished tonight. I’m not reviewing these books on this blog because I don’t want to speak out of turn and get in trouble, so the posts when I read for work will cover reading-related topics. We recently moved. It was…
My superpower appears to have weaknesses. My husband & I moved on Thursday, and it has been a whirlwind of unpacking, and I haven’t been able to relax enough to read until tonight. I did a chapter or two before bed, but not my usual hour of leisurely page turning. And last night, I actually fell asleep on the couch without reading a word all day! I think that had to do with being sick. Fear not, blog readers–I am 300 pages into Anna Karenina…
Last night’s work read was a novel whose tone profoundly disturbed me. But that’s all I can say because I don’t blog in detail about the books I read for work. Instead, you get a post On Reading. I recently posted a few of my blog reviews up on Amazon, just to see what would happen, and in doing so remembered that I posted a review on Amazon a very loooooooong time ago–my only one until recently. I wasn’t sure if it’d still be there,…
Finished a book tonight for my reading job, which thankfully has started up again after a very loooooong holiday hiatus. I was getting used to having my evenings and weekends to myself, but if this had gone on any longer my paranoia over being replaced by somebody faster than me would’ve driven me bonkers. If you’re new to this blog, I don’t post reviews of my work reading, but use these posts to muse about reading itself. I hate giving up on books, because I…
Synopsis: The best way to learn to write is by the close reading of great literature. Review: I wish I could get Francine Prose to tell me about every book I read. She is so astute and insightful about the craft of writing, and equally tuned into the joys that reading has to offer the lover of language. You might think that the Superfast Reader would be averse to a technique asking her to slow down and smell the sentences, but nothing could be further…
Since I’m already doing the classics challenge, I might as well do this one. I’ll be reading Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone. The Superfast Reader is not intimidated by long books, but she is intimidated by long books with dense prose in genres that are not her favorite.
How could the Superfast Reader not be excited about this? Reading bloggers have been invited to read 5 classics in the months of January and February, courtesy of A Reader’s Journey. My five, culled from my BookMooch stack: A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll The Railway Children by E. Nesbit The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins A Room with a View by EM Forster HT: The Sheila Variations
This post is going up in commemoration of the book I read for work last night and this morning. Check out the On Reading tag for more of the same. The book I read for work, while I won’t reveal the title or author because it hasn’t been published yet, had a really involved, contrived setup that forecasted everything that was going to happen in the plot, to the point where I was like, “Get on with it already, since I already know how this…