Seems like this place is turning into a kind of reading log or something. Hope that's okay.Somehow I left Middlemarch at school today so I had kind of a listless paging through of various books I couldn't quite commit to tonight. Middlemarch has such a different feel compared to Mill, and I miss the smaller canvas, I think. Eliot as narrator is much more/ too willing to stand on stage here and dictate. I looked forward to those moments in Mill because the interruptions feel like polite asides, but there are pages of dictum in Middlemarch with nary a paragraph indentation to rest the eyes. Still, Rosamond is amusing and I look forward to the Fred/ Mary courtship, too.
Because Talking Heads are in my top 1 bands of all time, I like bikes, and it is such a pretty book, I spent twenty minutes with David Byrne's Bicycle Diaries tonight, too. If it ever comes true where you get to invite any 10 people you want to a dinner party, he would be one for sure. The problem with this book for me is that his prose matches the kind of flat effect of his real-life voice, too. Or is that "affect"? I think it is. Anyway, it was a pretty book to hold for twenty minutes, reading about the different cities he's ridden around in. My favorite brief chapter is his account of riding from inner Detroit to the suburbs, which sounds insane for a number of reasons but which now strikes me as an essential ride that I must undertake. I've always loved Woodward Ave. in Detroit for the same reasons he suggests, basically that this route is a kind of core sample of the city, or a museum or a time-line. It's so sad, but it's hard to look away. I will probably come back to this book.
2 comments:
I really like your writing style.
oh, that's high praise, Dawn . . I may ask to use it for a blurb some day.
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