2012
and i walk
maura @ 6:12 pm
I’ve been trying to get back in the swing of fiction reading lately but I’m having trouble reading anything other than YA dystopia. Blame the Hunger Games, of course, but also probably my brain-fried-at-the-end-of-the-semester-ness, which seems to have rendered me incapable of reading grown-up books. Is it the slower plotting? I just don’t know — it’s 800 bajillion degrees out today and my brain has melted.
The last grown-up novel I tried to read was Swamplandia!, which I checked out from the public library onto my phone and was unable to finish before it expired. Partly it was the annoyingness of the fact that ebooks expire in the first place, which seems so silly and made me dig in my heels about finishing it, esp. since the pagination on my phone made it 1274 pages long. Also I found it kind of depressing, and I recently decided to shake off my prior self-restriction about finishing books even if I don’t really like them because hey! life’s too short! And there are always other things to read.
I checked out two YA dystopian ebooks onto my phone, too: The Giver and Gathering Blue, both by Lois Lowry. They were pretty good, both set in the same world, I think, though the characters in each didn’t overlap. They share a similar trait that I can’t decide how I feel about: both end right in the middle of some action. The endings are basically upbeat, but it’s just kind of weird to have things break off and not be resumed in the next book. There’s one more book in this loose trilogy so I’m planning to get that from the library, too.
Then I got kind of annoyed that the library has such a craptastic selection of ebooks (which is not our fault! blame the publishers, not the libraries! we WANT to have a better selection, honest, but they won’t sell them to us!) because I had to place a hold on my next two YA books (plus the new Alison Bechdel book) in paper since an ebook version wasn’t available. Not that I mind paper (and in many ways I prefer it, see above re: pagination) but I’ve had a bunch of meetings in Manhattan recently and ebooks are so much easier to schlepp on the subway. Plus the instant gratification thing: if the title is available, that’s kind of crack-tastic.
I’m also reading Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan books (finished the first last week, onto the second now), a steampunk + genetic manipulation of animals World War I trilogy that Gus devoured last year. So one of the books I requested from the library is Uglies, Westerfeld’s YA dystopian book (first of 4, I think?). The other book I requested is The Explosionist, which I found again while trolling my Delicious for things I tagged “to read”.
I’d meant to pick those two up over the weekend, because I got the email that they’re on the hold shelf for me, but the library’s closed for the holiday. Denied!
2 comments on “and i walk”
Yeah, I <3 the books w/pictures too. And my kid, who spontaneously pulled The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins off the shelf to read today.
Nope, not on Goodreads, should I be? I have a hard time keeping up with the social medias recently, Twitter is about the limit of what I can handle.
Yay for new Alison Bechdel! That would def be better in paper — that is the point, right? Well, sorta. I haven’t read it yet but I read Fun Home at my in-laws (my father-in-law had a copy just sitting there!!!)
I am only liking books with pictures. I think I have always been like this, just now realizing. Everything else = boring.
Are you on Goodreads? Good ness. I have found books that aren’t on there. I think I need newer ones.