decemberthirty: (Default)
I finished Valencia, and I must admit that my opinion of it didn't change. Michelle Tea's style was engaging, and it was interesting to read about this cast of characters who are superficially quite similar to me, but lead lives that are so incredibly different than mine. All in all, however, I stand by the opinion that I expressed in my last post. The book came off as repugnantly self-indulgent.

After finishing Valenica, I didn't get started on my book club reading, primarily because Miss E. bought the book and promptly absconded with it to California. So I won't be able to get going on that until she returns. In the meantime, I decided to begin my annual re-reading of Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea series. I've been reading the series once a year for quite a few years, and every year the experience is different. For the past few years, I've been less than eager to get started, and consequently really dragged through the first book or two before finding that things picked up considerably in the last two books, making the whole experience worthwhile. This year, however, I actually experienced a strong craving to begin reading A Wizard of Earthsea, something that hasn't happened in years. And I'm loving it. The book is arousing in me the kind of emotions that I used to experience four or five years ago when I read it. I don't really know why this is happening, but I'm very happy about it. This is a book that means so much to me, and I'm glad to feel strongly about it again.
decemberthirty: (Default)
I finally finished Speak, Memory. As I mentioned last time, it did get more exciting toward the end, but I still wasn't that impressed with it. Nabokov just let his memory wander and put down whatever came to mind. It's an interesting concept, but it didn't work that well in execution.

Also, I attended the first meeting of the book club that I mentioned. I'm actually excited about it. It's an interesting group of people, and I think I will still be able to do non-book-club related reading, which was my biggest concern. We're going to read Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maguire as our first book.

I haven't started it yet, but I did start reading Valencia by Michelle Tea, which I wound up borrowing from my book club friend. She loved it and recommended it highly, but I have to admit that I'm not that impressed. It's the possibly semi-fictionalized account of the author basically "dropping out" of society in San Francisco. She never keeps jobs, she lives in nasty little apartments, she does lots of drugs, sleeps with lots of women, is constantly drunk, and somehow seems to think that this makes her hip, political, and edgy. I don't know. Saying this makes me feel awfully judgmental and square, but it all seems rather self-indulgent to me. Nonetheless, it's pretty light, and I'm whipping through it fairly quickly. I think it's the kind of book that I'm most likely to remember as a momentary diversion between books that I read "for real".
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