Feb. 9th, 2009 07:30 pm
Bookish hooky!
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muckefuckFelt nasty today and simply stayed home. I completely forgot that ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
monshu was coming home at lunchtime to complete his staff evaluations (so much easier to do when they aren't around!) so we both got a little surprise when he walked into the bedroom to change. My back was really bothering me (a consequence of all that ice-hacking Saturday) so I welcomed being barred from using the computer. Sitting in the comfy chair in the sunroom reading by the light of the warming winter sun with a cuppa at my elbow and my beloved tapping away in the next room really banished all misgivings about this place from my mind, at least for a few hours.
I'm finally finished with Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games, which was a decent read if also confirmation that he simply isn't that gifted a novelist. I picked it up because it featured as chief protagonist Sikh policeman Sartaj Singh from my favourite story in his collection Love and longing in Bombay. But half the book is dedicated to recounting the familiar tale of the rise and fall of an urban gangster, which I eventually got into but became tedious before it was over. In addition, there are at least four tangential character studies simply grafted into the work, two immediately after the somewhat anticlimactic climax. Better he should've saved them for his next short story compilation, I say.
Last week I also managed to dispense with a Mahfouz novella, Respected Sir, and David Malouf's Remembering Babylon, but only because I'd started the latter months ago and left it half-finished. Beautiful writing, but again, a lot of digressive character development that overwhelms the main narrative line. That's less of a problem for Malouf than for Chandra since at least he's not ostensibly writing a plot-driven novel, but it does make it a bit harder to propel oneself over the finish line. By contrast, the Mahfouz focuses on a single protagonist, so his character study ends up quite naturally adopting the subject's relentless ascent through the rungs of civil service as its narrative arc.
When I stopped by the old place on Sunday, I made sure to pick up a few virgin titles. I'll begin with Elias Khoury's Gate of the Sun, but if I find that tough going, I've got Knut Hamsun's Hunger to fall back on. And, of course, there's still Rohinton Mistry's Family matters waiting patiently on the nightstand for me to rediscover my interest in Parsi domestic drama.
monshu was coming home at lunchtime to complete his staff evaluations (so much easier to do when they aren't around!) so we both got a little surprise when he walked into the bedroom to change. My back was really bothering me (a consequence of all that ice-hacking Saturday) so I welcomed being barred from using the computer. Sitting in the comfy chair in the sunroom reading by the light of the warming winter sun with a cuppa at my elbow and my beloved tapping away in the next room really banished all misgivings about this place from my mind, at least for a few hours.I'm finally finished with Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games, which was a decent read if also confirmation that he simply isn't that gifted a novelist. I picked it up because it featured as chief protagonist Sikh policeman Sartaj Singh from my favourite story in his collection Love and longing in Bombay. But half the book is dedicated to recounting the familiar tale of the rise and fall of an urban gangster, which I eventually got into but became tedious before it was over. In addition, there are at least four tangential character studies simply grafted into the work, two immediately after the somewhat anticlimactic climax. Better he should've saved them for his next short story compilation, I say.
Last week I also managed to dispense with a Mahfouz novella, Respected Sir, and David Malouf's Remembering Babylon, but only because I'd started the latter months ago and left it half-finished. Beautiful writing, but again, a lot of digressive character development that overwhelms the main narrative line. That's less of a problem for Malouf than for Chandra since at least he's not ostensibly writing a plot-driven novel, but it does make it a bit harder to propel oneself over the finish line. By contrast, the Mahfouz focuses on a single protagonist, so his character study ends up quite naturally adopting the subject's relentless ascent through the rungs of civil service as its narrative arc.
When I stopped by the old place on Sunday, I made sure to pick up a few virgin titles. I'll begin with Elias Khoury's Gate of the Sun, but if I find that tough going, I've got Knut Hamsun's Hunger to fall back on. And, of course, there's still Rohinton Mistry's Family matters waiting patiently on the nightstand for me to rediscover my interest in Parsi domestic drama.
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