telophase | Bookage, again

Got

rachelmanija's memoir All the Fishes Come Home to Roost from Amazon.com today (I had a Grand Plan to pre-order it from Borders and spike the sales a bit there, but then Mom phoned and said she was ordering a copy and would I like her to order a copy for me while she was at it, and ... well, the hell with her sales, free book XD)

And I, uh, just rocketed through it in two hours. Yes,

rachelmanija, months and months of your toil, all finished in TWO HOURS! XD

It's a good thing that I read it that fast, actually - the faster I go, the more I'm engaged in it. I'll have to reread it to get more details - right now it's mostly a blur of bizarre people and horrific abuse. Er, for the, like, three people on my friendslist who don't know who

rachelmanija is, this book is a memoir of her growing-up years on an ashram in India - her parents wigged out and moved to India when she was seven - and it's blackly funny, despite (and in some cases because of) the horrific bits. Go to the link and read more about it. :)

Random factlet - Steven Brust has just got hisself a Livejournal -

skzbrust

And speaking of

rachelmanija again, she recently posted an essay all about first lines in books and stories and how important they are, which is why I immediately thought of her when I picked up another of the books I checked out from the library and the first line was:

The woods were silent, other than the screaming.

And in other news, the History International channel is starting to run a British reality series about people trying to live as if they were in the Iron Age, in a re-created Iron Age settlement, and ... dude! I've been to that one! We went to it on a field trip in my Celtic World class when I was doing a semester abroad in Wales, at Trinity College in Carmarthen. Nifty!

Those are all the random things on my brain right now and I must GO TO SLEEP because I am TIRED.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Now that you know how horrible my childhood was, you should feel sorry for me and reward me with pages from Project Blue Rose.

Seriously, I love hearing that people read my book in two hours. It's supposed to be easy to read and hard to put down.

Strangely, while I was reading it, I didn't feel OMG I CANNOT PUT THIS DOWN!! but every time I thought that maybe I should, I just ... didn't. And when I finished, I assumed it was 11 PM, but it was only 9:45. :D

I can see why the two-star reviewer felt distanced from you-as-child, but ... if you depicted yourself as a child that was easy to warm up to, as they wanted, (a) you would have been a Tormented species of Mary Sue and (b) it wouldn't have been truthful - it certianly read to me as a useful protective strategy. Had I been in the same situation, I'd probably have done much the same, judging by the things I *did* do in response to (much, much lighter) ostracism, teasing, and bullying as a kid.

And the Booklist review where they said the flash-forwards disrupted the flow of the book? Allowed for breathing space, otherwise I'd be all OMG TOO MUCH ABUSE. Maybe it would have been faster-paced overall, but even the humor wouldn't have been able to stop me putting the book down, because it would have been overwhelming.

You wanna know what the weirdest bit when reading the book was? Normally as I read, I'm sort of having two stories at the same time - the one I'm reading, and then the one that's being absorbed into the stories already in my head - images or characters or scenes will be taken out and replayed with one of the characters in my head either replacing or assisting the protagonist of the book. I couldn't do that with this one, because I know you - it felt really bizarre to appropriate the life of someone I know. I feel a little bit like this with The Winter Prince, because my knowing

eegatland (for internet values of "know") means that I'm a bit more aware of how it's her story, and I can't appropriate the characters and put them into the stories in my head (which are mostly an amalgam of whatever books and manga and movies and anime I've read in the past few years anyway) without feeling a little odd.

But I couldn't do that at all with Fishes. It's just ... too weird. XD

My rule of thumb is that it takes me about one minute to read a page. Amazon.com says your book is 352 pages, which means I'd expect it to take me almost 6 hours.

telophase, do I get to be really jealous of your reading speed? Amazon also says it has shipped me my copy by snailmail, so I hope it arrives by the end of the week. I'm curious to see how long it takes me to read.

It's got wide margins and decently large print. I also read very fast in general, but it's often barely more than skimming - I don't mull anything over, and I miss details here and there. Some books I just can't do that on - Cryptonomicon and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell are two cases in point. Cryptonomicon took me two weeks to get through, and I'm about 200 pages into JS&MN, and gave up reading until I get some large chunks of time in which to sit and read, since recently I've only had 15-minutes chunks.

_JS&MN_ is lovely and the Simon Prebble reading of it on Audible is, based on a half-hour's listen, also very nice, though the long footnotes would probably be tricky for the first time out loud.

Nice. I've enjoyed what I've read of it so far, but it's really hard going in those small chunks and I want to get more deeply involved.

I may have to get it from Audible once I've finished the dead-tree version.

The woods were silent, other than the screaming.

What book? What book? ::wants::

The Game of Sunken Places, by M.T. Anderson. I'm only about a chapter in - two 13-year-old boys go visit the elderly, ~~crazy~~ opinionated uncle of one of them up in the Vermont backwoods. I'm at the point where they've just arrived at his house.

Wow, my reading comprehension sucks. Somehow I thought this was the first line of Fishes. *thinks* I probably skipped ahead the rest of the sentence after reading And speaking of rachelmanija again, she recently posted an essay all about first lines in books and stories and how important they are.

Bookage, again

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