Wednesday Reading Meme
Wednesday, March 20th, 2013 09:29 pmWhat have you just finished?
The Agency: A Spy in the House, which has been on my shelves, a third read, since July. Finished it off last night, skimming and skipping, because I refuse to let a YA book consume several more days on top of the ones it swallowed last summer.
White is for Witching. Oyeyemi writes the kind of book that simple-minded readers like me can't read properly. She's a marvellous writer but I can't follow what she's doing. This may be because of what I normally read. Someone reviewing this said, essentially, 'If you loved We Have Always Lived in the Castle, this is for you.' Well, I did and it wasn't. Castle is a genre book; it does its genre task very neatly indeed and solves the riddle so that even the dumbest ox knows what happens. Witching is not genre, so even though there's a House, with Things in it, ummm-- there's no guarantee that actually there *is* a House rather than a house, or Things inside it; or if there are, there's no saying what the Things are. Thus literature.
( Cut for prolixity in the other sections )
The Agency: A Spy in the House, which has been on my shelves, a third read, since July. Finished it off last night, skimming and skipping, because I refuse to let a YA book consume several more days on top of the ones it swallowed last summer.
White is for Witching. Oyeyemi writes the kind of book that simple-minded readers like me can't read properly. She's a marvellous writer but I can't follow what she's doing. This may be because of what I normally read. Someone reviewing this said, essentially, 'If you loved We Have Always Lived in the Castle, this is for you.' Well, I did and it wasn't. Castle is a genre book; it does its genre task very neatly indeed and solves the riddle so that even the dumbest ox knows what happens. Witching is not genre, so even though there's a House, with Things in it, ummm-- there's no guarantee that actually there *is* a House rather than a house, or Things inside it; or if there are, there's no saying what the Things are. Thus literature.
( Cut for prolixity in the other sections )
