What I'm reading
Feb. 2nd, 2011 11:03 pmI'm loving my Kindle. It was very convenient in Boston to have a small bookshelf with me in my shoulder-bag, at least until I ran out of charge.
So far, I've been reading mostly free books. Rather a lot of the contents of Project Gutenberg are available for the Kindle from Amazon, which is the most convenient way to get books. I've been indulging in a lot of late-nineteenth-century girls' novels. I'm beginning to notice the flaws, however. For one thing, there's a distressing lack of adult supervision. This is to be expected in the boarding-school stories, where part of the point is to sneak around the books. But I've read a few too many in a row where the mother dies, leaving the teenage daughter to keep house for her absent-minded father and raise her multitudinous younger siblings All By Herself -- which is to say, with the help of between two and six servants. All of this with nary a mention of the decades of therapy they're all going to need as adults. At lunchtime today, I found myself growling, "Well, doctor, if you'd just kept it in your pants from time to time, you wouldn't have nine motherless children!" Methinks it's time to change genre.
I intend to put myself through a virtual stack of literature with which all well-educated people are familiar, but I have somehow missed. I've got Poe and Doyle and a smattering of others queued up already. Of course, after last weekend, I think I need to catch up on my Norse mythology first. Foolishly, I stipulated that Andrew couldn't use any of the Cthulhu mythos in the game. It didn't occur to me to make him promise not to drive my character insane through other mythologies.
So far, I've been reading mostly free books. Rather a lot of the contents of Project Gutenberg are available for the Kindle from Amazon, which is the most convenient way to get books. I've been indulging in a lot of late-nineteenth-century girls' novels. I'm beginning to notice the flaws, however. For one thing, there's a distressing lack of adult supervision. This is to be expected in the boarding-school stories, where part of the point is to sneak around the books. But I've read a few too many in a row where the mother dies, leaving the teenage daughter to keep house for her absent-minded father and raise her multitudinous younger siblings All By Herself -- which is to say, with the help of between two and six servants. All of this with nary a mention of the decades of therapy they're all going to need as adults. At lunchtime today, I found myself growling, "Well, doctor, if you'd just kept it in your pants from time to time, you wouldn't have nine motherless children!" Methinks it's time to change genre.
I intend to put myself through a virtual stack of literature with which all well-educated people are familiar, but I have somehow missed. I've got Poe and Doyle and a smattering of others queued up already. Of course, after last weekend, I think I need to catch up on my Norse mythology first. Foolishly, I stipulated that Andrew couldn't use any of the Cthulhu mythos in the game. It didn't occur to me to make him promise not to drive my character insane through other mythologies.