Weekend reading roundup (06 Mar 2017)

[nanila]

How did your weekend reading go? If you planned on anything specifically, did you read it?

Comments

[heliopausa]

I didn't get to read much - one more chapter of Nation is all, plus a quick read of friends on DW and LJ, and obligatory skim of online newspapers.

[nanila]

I know this feeling. Well done on squeezing in what you could!

[nanila]

I started reading Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology this weekend and am about fifty pages into it. My partner received it as a birthday present. I'm reading it to the children. They are growing very attached to Loki. I'm not entirely certain this is a good thing.

[nou]

Snap!

What do you think of it? I can see it working well for reading-to-children.

[nou]

Since last report, I have read:

• Moon Over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch. Second in a series, still enjoying them.
• Night Song of the Last Tram by Robert Douglas. Memoirs set in Glasgow. I read this because I was on holiday in Glasgow and wanting to read something local. It did that thing of reporting verbatim conversations that the author wasn’t actually there for, which I find a bit annoying, but overall I enjoyed it, and when I go back to Glasgow next year I'll try one of the author’s novels.
• Lanark by Alasdair Gray. Another Glasgow-based novel, but this one very different! It’s a sort of combination of coming-of-age story and surrealism. It’s also huge, and took me several days to finish, so I actually finished it back in London. I’m glad I read it, but I probably wouldn’t read it again. The structure is interesting, but the central character is not.
• Efuru by Flora Nwapa. A classic of Nigerian literature that I hadn’t got around to before. I really enjoyed this and will read it again, even though the formatting in the ebook edition isn’t great — the words are run together in many places, and the linebreaks and quotation marks in the dialogue aren’t always accurate — so in places it’s hard to understand who’s speaking. I’ll probably pick up a paper copy some time.
• Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman. This was... OK, I suppose? I’m probably not the intended audience for this, since having read Donald A Mackenzie’s Teutonic Myth and Legend several times as a child (including making my own family tree of all the gods), I was already very familiar with these stories, and this retelling generally didn’t add very much.

[ironed_orchid]

I read a novella and made a start on The Obelisk Gate.

[bonnefois]

I finished I'm just here for the Free Wifi by Chelsea Fagan.

[fred_mouse]

I've finally finished reading 'Good Omens' (yes, for the first time) -- was just the rambling author notes in the back that I hadn't touched. Also read a bit of an academic work on same-sex relationships in the mediaeval period that I'm not going to have time to finish (has to go back to the library -- I missed it when I collected the rest together), and started 'The Wizardry of Jewish Women' (fiction) which is slow going, partly because there is a lot going on, and partly because some of the content is emotionally challenging.