Are intermittent sounds discontinous?
Aug. 4th, 2019 03:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
todayiamadaisyI missed last week's update. Oh well. Nothing much happened. And nothing much again this week. I did my tax. I went to the theatre to see Much Ado About Nothing. I went out for lunch one day to the new café that's opened in the ground floor of Old Work's building, which I wish had been there when I was in that building as it was better than the café that was previously there. And now I'm cooking an egg and bacon pie to take for lunches this week. It's all go, obviously.
July books read
* Ransom - David Malouf (2009) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
I was a reluctant starter with this book. I've had a difficult reading relationship with David Malouf after reading and not enjoying one of his works for school twenty years ago. But this came up as part of a Trojan War binge, and it's beautiful. It recounts the meeting between Achilles and Priam for the return of Hector's body, so it covers barely a day — but in that day it takes in beginnings and endings, inevitability and chance, and ways of being in the world. All that, and a little donkey.
* Stasi Child - David Young (2015) ★ ★ ★
East Berlin, 1975: A teenage girl is found dead, unexpectedly fleeing from West to East Berlin. This started so well — set in a surveillance state with a young woman as the chief investigator — but as the coincidences about her personal life start to pile up, my patience started to wear thin.
* The Vanishing Man: In Pursuit of Velázquez - Laura Cumming (2016) ★ ★ ★ ★
A book that's not about one vanishing man, but three: a portrait of the future Charles I by Velázquez, a Victorian bookseller called John Snare who becomes obsessed with it, and Velázquez himself. The tale of Snare's ruinous fascination with the portrait is told in alternating chapters with brief critiques of other works. The end is weak and the whole description makes it seem disjointed, but I thought it came together well and gobbled it up.
* The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone - Felicity McLean (2019) ★ ★
In a small Australian town in the early nineties, three girls go missing; twenty years later their friend returns home and reflects on their disappearance. What she doesn't reflect on is what must have been a terrible police investigation that failed to uncover some very obvious evidence — and that's what really let the book down for me. It plays out with media coverage of the Lindy Chamberlain case in the background, but it doesn't think to apply that intense scrutiny to its own mystery, which ultimately didn't ring true to me.
And finally, the weekly knitting update:
The back of the cowl, for a change of view.
July books read
* Ransom - David Malouf (2009) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
I was a reluctant starter with this book. I've had a difficult reading relationship with David Malouf after reading and not enjoying one of his works for school twenty years ago. But this came up as part of a Trojan War binge, and it's beautiful. It recounts the meeting between Achilles and Priam for the return of Hector's body, so it covers barely a day — but in that day it takes in beginnings and endings, inevitability and chance, and ways of being in the world. All that, and a little donkey.
* Stasi Child - David Young (2015) ★ ★ ★
East Berlin, 1975: A teenage girl is found dead, unexpectedly fleeing from West to East Berlin. This started so well — set in a surveillance state with a young woman as the chief investigator — but as the coincidences about her personal life start to pile up, my patience started to wear thin.
* The Vanishing Man: In Pursuit of Velázquez - Laura Cumming (2016) ★ ★ ★ ★
A book that's not about one vanishing man, but three: a portrait of the future Charles I by Velázquez, a Victorian bookseller called John Snare who becomes obsessed with it, and Velázquez himself. The tale of Snare's ruinous fascination with the portrait is told in alternating chapters with brief critiques of other works. The end is weak and the whole description makes it seem disjointed, but I thought it came together well and gobbled it up.
* The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone - Felicity McLean (2019) ★ ★
In a small Australian town in the early nineties, three girls go missing; twenty years later their friend returns home and reflects on their disappearance. What she doesn't reflect on is what must have been a terrible police investigation that failed to uncover some very obvious evidence — and that's what really let the book down for me. It plays out with media coverage of the Lindy Chamberlain case in the background, but it doesn't think to apply that intense scrutiny to its own mystery, which ultimately didn't ring true to me.
And finally, the weekly knitting update:
The back of the cowl, for a change of view.