Snively Saturday and Tag Line Switcheroos

Happy frackin' Saturday. Scheduled a mandatory faculty meeting this morning and 3 of 10 showed up. I'm just going to whine now, thankyouverymuch. I'll spare y'all though and go home and whine to Chuck. By the pool. With a beer.

But before I head home to my laptopless condo, I thought I'd do a little Saturday posting.

I announced a while ago that I'm making a concerted effort to read more literary fiction this year with my personal Tournament of Books reading challenge, and I thought it was time for a new tagline to reflect my goal. My taglines started with "A baby in one hand and a book in the other," after Greyson's birth,  I moved on to a quote from Great Expectations, and now I've arrived at my favorite so far...

"Butchering literary fiction one novel at a time..."

Because, let's face it, I'm picky, fickle, kind of outspoken and sassy, and generally a smartass. Some lit fiction and I get along just fine, and sometimes I want to skewer the book AND/OR the author, too. *coughFREEDOMcough*

New on my stacks and prime for some snuggling or some skewering are...

Everything Beautiful Began After by Simon van Booy and The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. I loooove me some Simon Van Booy ever since the Estella's Revenge E-Zine days when I first encountered his short story collection, The Secret Lives of People in Love. This is his first novel, and I'm really pulling for more snuggle and less skewer. I have high hopes! I'll be reading this one quickly since the e-galley expires on 7/5/11.

The other book is Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus. I actually haven't gotten the NetGalley thumbs up on this one yet, but I'm doing a little e-galley dance that it's approved soon. It looks de-lic-ious.

I hope you're all having a great weekend. My laptop will be back in my itchy little bloggy hands this afternoon or tomorrow, so expect some Tweeting and some Tumbling. I'm having social network DTs.

Snively Saturday and Tag Line Switcheroos

Happy frackin' Saturday. Scheduled a mandatory faculty meeting this morning and 3 of 10 showed up. I'm just going to whine now, thankyouverymuch. I'll spare y'all though and go home and whine to Chuck. By the pool. With a beer.

But before I head home to my laptopless condo, I thought I'd do a little Saturday posting.

I announced a while ago that I'm making a concerted effort to read more literary fiction this year with my personal Tournament of Books reading challenge, and I thought it was time for a new tagline to reflect my goal. My taglines started with "A baby in one hand and a book in the other," after Greyson's birth,  I moved on to a quote from Great Expectations, and now I've arrived at my favorite so far...

"Butchering literary fiction one novel at a time..."

Because, let's face it, I'm picky, fickle, kind of outspoken and sassy, and generally a smartass. Some lit fiction and I get along just fine, and sometimes I want to skewer the book AND/OR the author, too. *coughFREEDOMcough*

New on my stacks and prime for some snuggling or some skewering are...

Everything Beautiful Began After by Simon van Booy and The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. I loooove me some Simon Van Booy ever since the Estella's Revenge E-Zine days when I first encountered his short story collection, The Secret Lives of People in Love. This is his first novel, and I'm really pulling for more snuggle and less skewer. I have high hopes! I'll be reading this one quickly since the e-galley expires on 7/5/11.

The other book is Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus. I actually haven't gotten the NetGalley thumbs up on this one yet, but I'm doing a little e-galley dance that it's approved soon. It looks de-lic-ious.

I hope you're all having a great weekend. My laptop will be back in my itchy little bloggy hands this afternoon or tomorrow, so expect some Tweeting and some Tumbling. I'm having social network DTs.

Book-in-Progress...C!

It's taken me a while to make a big dent in Tom McCarthy's Booker-nominated, C, so I thought I'd post while in progress on this one.

From the outset, I wasn't too sure about this novel. It's a huge tangle of weird happenings in the life of one very odd and detached duck, Serge Carrefax. His father tinkers with early wireless technology while running a school for the deaf. His sister Sophie is an obsessive, cold, somewhat incestuous mess of a science nerd. He goes to a spa in Germany to have his bowels set right. He flies a plane in WWI where he becomes a drug addict. And that's only up to page 173 of 310.

The story is weird, dark, droning in spots. Despite those not necessarily positive descriptors, I am absolutely captivated by this book. It's clever, full of wordplay and historical references, and there's a lot of twistiness!

If I were to rationalize the title at this point -- beyond Carrefax, caul, and some other key words that hit the reader over the head -- I would say this book is about connections. The odd, seemingly loose ends that all come together to form a life. While Serge himself is not terribly likable or extraordinary, the coincidences and trail of plot twists in his life are pretty amazing, if often tragic.

If you want to be titillated, check out the passage below. Serge is flying over the landscape of WWI and knows that tunnelers have been planting bombs underneath the Germans' trenches. This is what he imagines as he sails over the front:

Serge becomes fascinated with these tunnellers, these moles. He pictures their noses twitching as they alternately dig and strap on stethoscopes that, pressing to the ground, they listen through for sounds of netherer moles undermining their undermining. If they did hear them doing this, he tells himself, then they could dig an even lower tunnel, undermine the under-undermining: on and on forever, or at least for as long as the volume and mass of the globe allowed it--until the earth gave over to a molten core, or, bypassing this, they emerged in Australia to find there was not war there and, unable to return in time for action, sat around aimlessly blinking in the daylight...

That's all for now, but I'll be back with my final thoughts when I'm done with this one. I suspect I'll spend a few late nights wrapping it up!!! It's worth slowing down and taking in.

Book-in-Progress...C!

It's taken me a while to make a big dent in Tom McCarthy's Booker-nominated, C, so I thought I'd post while in progress on this one.

From the outset, I wasn't too sure about this novel. It's a huge tangle of weird happenings in the life of one very odd and detached duck, Serge Carrefax. His father tinkers with early wireless technology while running a school for the deaf. His sister Sophie is an obsessive, cold, somewhat incestuous mess of a science nerd. He goes to a spa in Germany to have his bowels set right. He flies a plane in WWI where he becomes a drug addict. And that's only up to page 173 of 310.

The story is weird, dark, droning in spots. Despite those not necessarily positive descriptors, I am absolutely captivated by this book. It's clever, full of wordplay and historical references, and there's a lot of twistiness!

If I were to rationalize the title at this point -- beyond Carrefax, caul, and some other key words that hit the reader over the head -- I would say this book is about connections. The odd, seemingly loose ends that all come together to form a life. While Serge himself is not terribly likable or extraordinary, the coincidences and trail of plot twists in his life are pretty amazing, if often tragic.

If you want to be titillated, check out the passage below. Serge is flying over the landscape of WWI and knows that tunnelers have been planting bombs underneath the Germans' trenches. This is what he imagines as he sails over the front:

Serge becomes fascinated with these tunnellers, these moles. He pictures their noses twitching as they alternately dig and strap on stethoscopes that, pressing to the ground, they listen through for sounds of netherer moles undermining their undermining. If they did hear them doing this, he tells himself, then they could dig an even lower tunnel, undermine the under-undermining: on and on forever, or at least for as long as the volume and mass of the globe allowed it--until the earth gave over to a molten core, or, bypassing this, they emerged in Australia to find there was not war there and, unable to return in time for action, sat around aimlessly blinking in the daylight...

That's all for now, but I'll be back with my final thoughts when I'm done with this one. I suspect I'll spend a few late nights wrapping it up!!! It's worth slowing down and taking in.