Notes
One problem with reading ebooks from the library is that heftier ones can be hard to finish in the loan period. If others want to read the book, you lose access to it temporarily and face a few options:
- Buy the book
- Borrow a paper copy
- Put a new hold on and wait for it again
If they'd had a copy at the closest FLoP branch, I might have borrowed that, but for now I've got a renewed hold on the ebook and will continue when it becomes available.
Completed
nothing completed
On Hold
Gandhi Autobiography. Gandhi, after a short stint back in India after his English education, has headed to South Africa. While in India, he had a distinct lack of success as a lawyer, so the opportunity to go to South Africa was quite welcome, and is doing him good. His language expertise and the opportunity to work with a larger firm of experienced lawyers has helped him learn his trade. He has also come face to face with South African apartheid, which while it is not as oppressive for a visiting Indian lawyer as it is for native Africans, still limits his options of residence, and his actions as a lawyer. I'll let him stay in Pretoria for a time and read other books until I, once again, have this one to read.
Continuing Reading
Nicole is on the moon now in The Relentless Moon trying to suss out various problems, including sabotage and a polio outbreak that may or may not be sabotage. Her husband's official entry in the presidential race introduces other complications as does not knowing who to trust. It is as engaging as the previous books in the series, combining interesting tidbits of space program details with historical context. I hadn't realized, for example, that the polio vaccine became available not that long before my birth. Nor did I realize how zero-g complicated GI illness since there is no gravity to keep the solid and liquid contents of the stomach at the bottom - burps can't happen without gravity, only upchucking. Lovely to contemplate. Quite an enjoyable read continues, but should be finished before long.
Books Started
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is a very clever book. It begins with "Rules and Suggestions for Enjoyment of this Book,"
- There is no overwhelming need to read the preface. Really....If you have alread read the preface, and wish you had not, we apologize. We should have told you sooner.
Thus it begins and continues in that vein, of course, making the reader all the more interested in reading the preface and other parts of the book that are discouraged. The preface itself contains pages of text that were removed from others parts of the book. I'm currently in the middle of the Acknowledgements (which precede the core chapters rather than follow them, and was among the parts the reader was discouraged from reading)
The thing about cleverness is that I'm not really a fan. Cleverness is often largely about showing off to people just how clever you are, which isn't actually all that interesting. Being too clever can distract from the story you are trying to tell or the point you are trying to make more easily than it can contribute to it.
That said, I had no business borrowing a book titled A Heartbradking Work of Staggering Genius if I wasn't ready for some clever writing. Given the subject matter (a memoir-ish story of losing both parents to cancer while a college senior), I can see how it might work. And Dave Eggers can write, no doubt about that.
In conclusion
Subterfuge on the moon and cleverness approaching death. Overdrive estimates a month before I'll have Gandhi back and while the Eggers is quasi-memoir, I'm lacking a definitively non-fiction book. Maybe something science-y like The Book of Eels (Patrik Svensson), but I've got a lot of social stuff on the backlog, like Locking up Our Own (James Forman Jr.) and Ghettoside (Jill Leovy), so the next book to start might be along those lines. It should be this coming week, either way.