The Bridge of Sighs by Olen Steinhauer

I was hoping this book would be like The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer, or Mission to Paris by Alan Furst. It's a thriller set in some unnamed Eastern European city (possibly in Ukraine) after World War II so you can see why that was a reasonable wish. But alas it has neither the sprawling reach of TIB nor the sympathetic characters of MtP. It's just a dark story of a troubled man in a miserable city during an unpleasant time in history. I read about two thirds of it and just...gave up. Which isn't to say it didn't have some redeeming value: Steinhauer writes lovely prose, and maybe in another mood the gallows humor might have appealed to me. Sometimes it isn't the book, it's the reader, though in this case I think it was a bit of both.

(Book 32, 2013)

Believe it or Not

....I am still reading Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel. It's been weeks. Like its predecessor, Wolf Hall, this book is slow going. Many bodies to keep track of. Now Master Cromwell is picking apart Henry's marriage to Anne Boleyn, stitch by stitch. It takes a long time.

Just for a break I read most of A Death in Vienna by Daniel Silva. But apparently you are supposed to read this series (about Israeli spy Gabriel Allon) in order, and this book was #4. No wonder I didn't know who anyone was. I haven't finished it and am not sure if I am going to because I am pretty lost. This seems like a good series, though it made me wonder how much longer contemporary authors can have their spies track down ex-Nazis, who you would think would all be dead by now, but I guess not.

I also started reading The Postmistress by Sarah Blake. It's good so far but I'm not very far along. I think I will finish that before finally returning to Master Cromwell and his maneuverings.

Faithful Place by Tana French

I'm finally admitting defeat. I cannot finish this. I so wanted to, having loved loved loved French's earlier novel The Likeness, which I blogged about here. I stuck with this one way longer than I would have otherwise, but still, I can't make it through.

French is notoriously long-winded. That was a big complaint about The Likeness, and I even referred to it in my own post: "French often uses three sentences when one would do." But while I enjoyed her style in that book, in Faithful Place her excess verbiage did me in. Usually it took the form of maudlin multipage conversations among a dysfunctional family of alcoholics and layabouts who pass their days accusing one another of historic betrayals and acts of violence, or convoluted theories about whodunit put forth by hostile law enforcement officers with competing agendas. Did I mention that this is a mystery? Who actually killed Rose is about 47th on the list of French's interests, it seems, well behind Dublin in the 1980's and the Irish economy, to name just two.

(Book 26, 2011)

The Ministry of Special Cases by Nathan Englander

I abandoned this book after page 7 because I didn’t like the narrator. In some books a narrator’s voice is imperceptible, but other times the voice is more present, inserting itself into the reader’s consciousness, shading the reader’s interpretations, leading the reader astray, even, or in the case of this book, just irritating the reader.

On the top of page 7 this book’s narrator describes a woman named Lila Finkel as having "a cunt of pure gold." Wow, that’s pretty extreme. We are only on page 7. I barely know this narrator; this is our first conversation, and the first I’ve heard of Lila. If I met a guy at a party who described his friend Lila that way, I’d get away from him as fast as I could, and think “what a creep.”

Now if that description of Lila had emerged from a character’s mouth instead of from the narrator my reaction would have been entirely different. I would have sailed right over it, and internalized the intended message “the person speaking is crude and uninterested in whether or not he offends.” But it came from the narrator’s voice and it said to me that this narrator doesn’t care if he offends me, and in fact, he probably isn’t even talking to me. He is probably picturing his reader as a man, his frat brother, his drinking buddy, someone with whom he can casually toss around a word like that with no thought of giving offense. Or maybe I am being too nice, maybe he pictures his reader as a woman too, and he wants to offend her, he wants her to be shocked. What’s going on with that?

Either way, I’m not going to listen. Yes, I am offended (what of Lila’s lips, her voice, her attention to detail, her excellent golf swing?). And really I just want to get away from this weirdo who describes women using crude names for their sexual parts. I’m not going to keep talking to him just to be polite, and I’m not going to keep reading this book just because someone else thinks it’s good. Maybe this narrator is an okay guy, and can tell an interesting story, but his utter disregard for my sensibilities (or his deliberate attempt to shock me) just put me off completely.

This was my book club’s December selection, and I complained about it in this post. I skipped the meeting for reasons unrelated to my dislike of the book. But what did the book club think, you might wonder. When I asked Elana how the meeting went, she replied that she thought it went well, though they “spent a lot of time talking about whether there was any redemption or if the book was just utter darkness. “ Whoa, utter darkness AND creepy weirdos. Get me out of there.

Two Recent Misses

Two books abandoned in the past week:

Until I Find You by John Irving. This started really slowly. Jack (age 4) and his mother (the famous tattoo artist known as Daughter Alice) wander around Europe searching for Jack’s unreliable church-organist/tattoo-addicted father, William. By the time Jack and Alice arrive in Finland, always one step behind William, I was just really bored. Then I read this review in the Guardian and I was just plain weirded out. I have loved a lot of John Irving books, but not so many recently.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley. This got a lot of good press but I didn’t like it enough to stick with it. It’s a mystery novel starring the motherless 11-year-old science whiz/amateur sleuth Flavia de Luce and it’s set in the British countryside in 1950. Bradley’s writing is self-consciously eccentric; he adopts a kind of faux 1950’s detective story narration style with lots of breathless end-of-chapter revelations. Writing in the Guardian, reviewer Laura Wilson says “Flavia… is so precocious that, if she existed, every adult she met would be itching to slap her.” I wanted to slap her even though she doesn’t exist.

Silent in the Grave by Deanna Raybourn

I had heard that this book was good but that’s not true. It’s a silly book and a waste of time. Set in Victorian London, Silent in the Grave is a weird combination of a Sherlock Holmes story and a romance novel. The Holmesian detective, Nicholas Brisbane, rather than coming across as mysterious, instead seems robotic and off-putting. The female protagonist, Julia, is supposed to be clever and ahead of her time, but she just seems anachronistic. And for someone who is meant to be smart, she is awfully dense. It takes her a long time to figure things out and I think this is a deliberate ploy on the part of the author to s-t-r-e-t-c-h out the action. This book is 506 pages of dithering (Julia) and glowering (Nicholas). Luckily I only read 109 of them.

Facing Reality

And the reality is, I am just not going to finish The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. I haven't picked it up since I wrote that post last Sunday and instead have been reading Raven Black, a mystery by Ann Cleeves, set in the Shetland Islands. It's very Ruth Rendell-ish and I'm liking it a lot.

It's not that The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is bad. It's fine, if you like long, slow moving books about dogs. Which I don't. Citizen Reader didn't like it either and she has a much more finely honed discussion of it; read that here.

One more complaint: Like Citizen Reader, I was curious about this book because it is set in Northern Wisconsin (my home state, and the home state of Citizen Reader). Northern Wisconsin has its own unique culture, history, foods, and traditions, barely a hint of which showed up in this book (or to be perfectly precise, not before page 70, where I abandoned reading it). I was really hoping for some Alice Munro-ish examination of rural life, and didn't find it. This book could have been set anywhere, and that's just a waste. (If you have read further than page 70 and have discovered a supper club please leave a comment.)

Not Alternate Enough

A few weeks ago I read and wrote about Resistance by Owen Sheers. That book, which is alternate history, led me to The Plot Against America by Philip Roth, which is also alternate history, and is set at about the same time as Resistance. But unlike Resistance, which takes place in far-away (for me) Wales, The Plot Against America takes place in Newark, New Jersey, in the very neighborhood in which my mother-in-law grew up. As I read the first few chapters of this book, I could imagine her parents, Grandpa Max and Grandma Rose, in their clapboard two-flat with the piano on the porch, and it was too close to home. The Nazis were coming! I just couldn't read it.

However, at Petrona I discovered an interesting post about a site that is a guide to alternate history books. Who knew there were so many? I just need to pick one that is a little more alternate, if you know what I mean.

A Quick Trip to India

My local library recently featured a display of Indian literature, that is, novels by Indians and about India. I often enjoy these, so I scooped up three that were new to me. It proved to be a mixed bag, and I didn’t finish any of them.

Bombay Time by Thrity Umrigar was the best of the bunch. It’s set in an apartment building in Bombay, and provides literary snapshots of many of the residents of this apartment as they gather to celebrate the wedding of one of the younger generation. More in the vein of connected short stories rather than a novel, I found the shifting focus interesting, but ultimately unsatisfying. I read about half the chapters and felt like I was done. I did enjoy learning about the Parsis, a community of which most of the book’s characters are members. This group is a minority religion in India, and I knew very little about them.

Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee by Meera Syal held my interest for a while. Unlike the other two, this one is set in Britain among the Indian immigrant community, and tells the story of three women who have been friends since childhood. The narration shifts among the three characters, and at times it felt like the author couldn’t decide if she was writing chick lit or serious fiction. It was good at first, but then I got bored.

I only read a few chapters of A Breath of Fresh Air by Amulya Malladi. I didn’t like this one at all. I thought it sounded good, because the blurb said it was about the Union Carbide accident in Bhopal in the 1980’s. But it wasn’t really about that at all (except very peripherally) and instead was some kind of lost love story where there were lots of BIG SECRETS and MYSTERIOUS STRANGERS. Maybe it was a Young Adult novel; sometimes those are a bit too obvious for my taste.

So, kind of a disappointing trip. But I will try again.

Icebergs by Rebecca Johns

This is beautifully written and very moving but I couldn't finish it. I got too upset by the two WWII airmen who were stranded in Labrador in a snowstorm after their plane crashed. I just didn't want to read about their deaths (or rather the death of one of them, given what I managed to glean from the blurb). Alternating with the story of the two lost airmen is the story of Dottie, one of their wives, who is home on her family's farm in southern Ontario. I really liked her story, but again, I couldn't figure out how to read just those parts. I can usually read about unpleasant things but this time it was too raw. It was almost like I thought maybe I could keep the airman alive if I didn't read the part where he dies. I may try this book again when I am in a different mood.

This book reminds me of another wonderful book about a Canadian family in the years after World War II. That book is A Good House by Bonnie Burnard. I never have met anyone who has read this, but I thought it was extremely good. I don't know why it didn't get any press.

Both Icebergs and A Good House are examples of how a skilled author can turn domestic fiction into art. Both feature measured prose, a lack of sentimentality, and very realistic characters.

Last Rituals by Yrsa Sigurdardottir

It's been a long time since a book gave me nightmares, but this one did. And when I woke up, I was angry. Why did the author have to make this book so gruesome?

I think Yrsa (to be correct in Icelandic) is a talented writer, and she's created a likeable protagonist, Thora, and a great setting at the University of Iceland with quirky professors and likeable janitors and an interesting subplot about some missing historial documents, and then she's plunked this totally revolting murder into the middle of it. I kept trying to read around the murder but that didn't work, as you would imagine. Finally I gave up. I'm really disappointed to not be able to finish this book, because I like Thora, and I like Iceland and all the other stuff, but what happens to this murdered guy (who seems like he deserves it) just makes me lose my lunch (or certainly my sleep) and I couldn't hack it any more.

Cleopatra's Nose by Judith Thurman

It’s time for me to admit that I am never going to finish this book. It’s been hanging around on my nightstand for months, and I’ve been occasionally dipping in, but for every three essays that I read, I hate two of them. That’s not a good enough average to keep going.

Thurman writes arts and cultural criticism for the New Yorker. Cleopatra’s Nose is a collection of her pieces written in the earlier part of this decade. They cover subjects such as Anne Frank, Leni Riefenstahl, Coco Chanel, and a visit to an artisan tofu maker in Japan. I’m linking to a review of the book that originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times. The author of that review, Meghan Daum, does a much better job of explaining the book’s problems than I can do. If you are truly considering reading this book, you should read Daum’s review first. I am going to just quote a few lines from her review here to give you a sense of what’s going on:

Thurman sometimes appears to be trying too hard to assert her Kulturkritik credentials…It's a good instinct for an essayist to pepper her prose with the kind of declarative sentences that evoke a camera pulling back for a wide shot. But for Thurman, with her particular fondness for assertions whose metaphysical pretensions outshine their relevance to the topic at hand, this works about half the time.

(Or for me, one third of the time.) Daum goes on to ask:

… what are we to do with wide turns into jargon such as this (on Spanish fashion designer Cristóbal Balenciaga): "Piety and chic may not obviously be compatible, but penitents and perfectionists tend to have a lot in common" or this (on photographer Diane Arbus): "Idolatry is a form of vandalism that often inspires a violent counterreaction of antipathy to the idol"?

Daum says what we should do is shake our heads and stay with the author. I disagree. When I encounter a statement like the one above, about Arbus, I feel like I’ve just run into a cinderblock with my car. Everything comes to a crashing halt, and I stand there saying “whaaaa???” Daum praises Thurman for not talking down to the reader; I criticize Thurman for being so purposefully obtuse as to baffle the reader and interrupt the flow of the essay.

Maybe if Thurman followed a statement like the Arbus one with an explanation, for example “I believe that idolatry is a form of vandalism because….” I would have more patience for it. But she just drops these bombs into the middle of her essays and then moves on, like the truck ahead of you that has dropped the cinderblock and driven away without noticing or stopping to see if you are hurt.

After the shock wears off I find myself thinking that I must just be too stupid to understand what the author is trying to say. But I know I am not stupid, so my next reaction is that the author is showing off and that somehow she wants me to feel stupid. Neither interpretation makes me enjoy what I am reading, so I’m abandoning this. Just for the record, I did like one essay, called “Reader, I Married Him” about Charlotte Bronte. It contained no cinderblocks.

The Skinny: How to Fit into Your Little Black Dress Forever by Melissa Clark and Robin Aronson

Observant blog readers will notice that I occasionally read diet and fashion books (but not very often, and now I remember why). This one caught my eye though – the reviews on Amazon proclaimed it “sensible” and I think that’s what attracted me. One of the authors (can’t remember which one) is a food writer, and I thought, well, that has to be a challenge, to be a slim food writer, so maybe she’s got some good advice.

She does (and her co-author, too) – there is good sensible information in this book about portion control, about making good food choices, about avoiding fad diets. There are also some appealing recipes. The problem is I have heard it all before. The other problem is the pink cover with the cartoony black dress, and what it represents. I am not 13 and probably neither are most of this book’s readers; why must the cover look like it was designed to appeal to a middle-schooler? And to take the whole thing to another level of criticism, there is the girlfriendy tone, and the anecdotes about how we’ve all been tempted to spend the rent money on those fabulous boots that would change our lives. Well, I have never been tempted to spend the rent money on boots. I spend the rent money on rent. And I never for a moment have thought that owning a certain pair of boots would change my life. Even if the message here is that it’s smarter to resist, I can’t help but feel that the book insults my intelligence with assumptions like these.

Am I overreacting? Should I have expected this? I don’t watch Sex and the City. I don’t read fashion magazines. I should just not even try reading books with bright pink covers.

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula LeGuin

I have read a few times the comment that J. K. Rowling owes a larger debt to Ursula LeGuin than she acknowledges. While I can’t comment on whether Rowling has paid that debt, I do now see what some people are talking about. Here is the original school for wizards on the island of Roke, in Earthsea, and here is the young wizard Ged who trains there. Here we also find the kindly powerful Archmage who leads the school, and Jasper, the young wizard’s high-born rival.

But there I stopped. Why? Want a list?

a) No women anywhere: no women teachers, no girl students. Why did LeGuin do this? Was it not possible in pre-feminist 1968 for a woman to write fantasy that included powerful women and girl characters? Maybe not. Without Hermione (and Tonks, Ginny, Professor McGonagall, etc.) it was really slow going.

b) No humor. This is a Serious Book. Not. One. Funny. Thing. Happens. Ever.

b) Way too much adolescent bad judgment. I stopped reading at the point where Ged does something enormously ill-advised as part of a confrontation with Jasper to prove who is the better wizard, with devastating consequences. Maybe it’s because I am the mother of two teenage boys, but I was just not in the mood for this. It made me want to take away their iPods and give them a stern lecture about how actions have consequences, and I do enough of that already, thank you.

I have no doubt that this is a good book. LeGuin’s writing is beautiful. But is it too dated for a contemporary reader? Will the lack of interesting female characters and the sober tone be stumbling blocks for other modern readers as well? I wonder.

The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay

Guy Gavriel Kay’s books are classified as fantasy but I think they fit better in the alternate history category. (Though fans of that genre might disagree.) Kay’s fantasy is distinguished more by what it lacks than what it offers: his books feature no witches, dwarves, elves, sorcerers, necromancers, spells, etc, indeed very little in the way of magic at all. What they do offer is interesting human characters and lots of action. The fantasy aspect comes in with his settings. In his books he creates highly fictionalized versions of real places in history. For example, his book A Song for Arbonne is really a tale of medieval Provence, complete with troubadours and courtly love. The Last Light of the Sun is set in an alternate 9th century Britain, with Erling warriors standing in for actual Vikings. He just takes the real settings and history, scrambles up the map, changes all the names to authentic-sounding alternatives, and writes a great story to go with it. I love it!

Only I didn’t love The Lions of Al-Rassan. Al-Rassan is medieval Spain, which has been carved up into a hodgepodge of Christian and Islamic fiefdoms, most of which are at war with one another (or if not actively at war, contemplating it). As is his habit, Kay has changed the names of these religions and made up different belief systems for them, but they are still easy to identify. He’s even created another group, the Kindath, to stand in for the Jews.

Maybe the problem is that medieval Spain was so mixed up that even the real history is difficult to follow. I just found myself completely confused by this book. I couldn’t keep any of the characters straight. The constantly shifting alliances meant that I also couldn’t keep track of who was on whose side (and there are about six different sides). The book provides a dramatis personae at the beginning, but even that didn’t help, because it only told whose side someone was on when the story began. I am usually pretty good at this kind of thing, and not easily put off by lots of characters with confusing names, but this book defeated me, and I couldn’t even finish it.

I believe that some of Kay’s earlier works do take a more traditional approach to fantasy. His Fionavar Tapestry trilogy is often described as “Tolkien-esque.” I haven’t tried those books. But I will continue to try his more recent works. I think he is evolving as a writer. It takes more than one bad experience to get me to abandon an author that I like as much as I have liked Kay.

(Book 39, 2007)
(I read enough of it to count it.)

Skimming Rather Than Reading

I don't usually skim books. I either read them or abandon them. But in the past few days I've skimmed two books; interestingly, the books were about the same thing, British women in World War II. One was fiction, a Persephone book, and the other was non-fiction. Maybe my lack of success with these books is a sign that I am done with this era.

A House in the Country by Jocelyn Playfair is a novel written in 1944 and re-released by Persephone. Playfair's writing style is one that I don't enjoy; she provide lots of detail about trivialities, and the serious stuff is dealt with in brief passing references. Thus we read (or skim!) many pages where the heroine extols the joys of eating in the kitchen (the servants have all been called up). Then we get about five sentences on the death of her husband. This style, which I've encountered before in some British fiction, always makes me feel like I'm looking through the wrong end of a telescope. Is it a stiff-upper-lip kind of thing? Talk about the weather instead of the atrocities? I skimmed the book, rather than abandoning it, thinking that I might get used to the style and learn to like it, but it was futile. That was Sunday's reading.

On Monday I started Debs at War. This is non-fiction, written by Anne de Courcy, who wrote the excellent biography of Diana Mosley that I read earlier this year. It chronicles the extreme changes that occurred in upper class women's lives as they transitioned from sheltered debutantes into nurses, pilots, farm workers, and factory workers at the outbreak of WWII. De Courcy makes the point that few generations have gone through the kinds of changes that this group saw: beginning life in luxury, raised by servants, not knowing how to cook, wash dishes or even how to clean their own clothes, and then moving to a life without servants, working for a living, managing money, meeting people outside their social class, etc. This is a scholarly work, and would make good background reading for someone writing a novel about the time. Rather than focusing on one woman throughout the book, de Courcy includes the memories of about 75 women, and has arranged her chapters by subject rather than time period. Thus there is no real story here, just a collection of memories about different topics. It kept me occupied for about an hour, reading a bit from each chapter, then I had had enough.

I noticed that both of these books used the pronoun "one" where a more modern (or maybe an American?) writer or speaker would use "you." I couldn't stop noticing it, and feeling annoyed by it. It made the novel feel very dated, and the women in Debs at War sound stuffy. No contemporary U.S. writer uses this pronoun any more, and I rarely encounter it in contemporary British fiction, unless it's to make a character sound a certain way.

Arthur and George by Julian Barnes

I've never been able to finish a book by Julian Barnes. I had hoped that Arthur and George would be my opportunity to finally break this streak, but alas. Once again, I have given up at page 115, which is about my average for his books. The other two I have tried are Flaubert's Parrot and A History of the World in 10½ Chapters. Both started off well (as did Arthur and George) but neither seemed to work for me past a certain point.

I can't really put my finger on why I don't succeed. The books always begin in an interesting way. But there seems to be a point at which I cease to care about the characters or the events. That's what happened in this book. I didn't care about Arthur very much, and I cared even less about George. And I couldn't figure out where the connection came between these two characters; by page 115 they hadn't yet met, and the book was continuing to use the formula of alternating chapters, one about Arthur, the next about George, etc. I was getting tired of that structure; like reading two books at once, both of which were dull.

The fact that Arthur is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was moderately interesting. Were his chapters a fictionalized account of his life? I'm not sure. George, as far as I could tell, is wholly fictional. Do these guys ever meet? I think they must, but I guess I'll never know for sure.

A look at Barnes's web site reveals that he's written all kinds of books, not just novels. I like the way he writes, so maybe I should try some of his essays or short stories, since they probably end before they get boring. Letters from London looks good, and Cross Channel.

Can't Settle Down

What a bad week. Here is a list of books that I've picked up and put down over the course of this week:

The Patron Saint of Liars by Ann Patchett. This is her first novel. I've read everything else she's written, and she hasn't come out with anything new in a while. Sometimes when that happens, I try reading an author's backlist, with mixed success. This book just didn't grab me, though it wasn't bad. But I quit after about 3 chapters.

Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants by Robert Sullivan, and American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center by William Langewiesche. Both of these were recommended by Nonfiction Readers Anonymous, who is organizing a book menage. Briefly, in a book menage, everyone reads a pair of related books (selected by vote on NonAnon's site) and discusses them in the comments on a certain date. It sounded like fun, but I wasn't interested in the titles that were selected (The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion and About Alice by Calvin Trillin; the first, because I already talked about it, the second because I'm waiting for the audiobook version of it). This other pair of titles was rejected by the voters, but I thought I might try them anyway. I got a third of the way through Rats and thought "wait, why am I reading this?" It was just a lot of information about rats in New York. Which you would think would have occurred to me. It reminded me of a long-ago family trip to an aquarium, where, 15 minutes into the tour my youngest turned to me and said "Can we leave? There's nothing here but fish."

The other book, American Ground, seemed like it would be good, but it started off with the last hours of the folks on the planes and in the towers and I found that just too sad for my mood. Maybe I'll try it again some other time.

As of last night I had read about 30 pages of The Night Watch by Sarah Waters. I may stick with this. I was determined NOT to read any more books about London during WWII for a while, but my library hold was about to expire on this, and I would have gone to the back of the line if I hadn't picked it up. It seems interesting, but I'm not sure if it will stick. Yesterday, as insurance, I also brought home Arthur and George by Julian Barnes and a Mary Balogh romance novel whose name escapes me.

And finally, the one book I read with any enthusiasm this week: Knit Two Together by Mel Clark and Tracey Ullman. When I had heard of this book, I thought, can it be THAT Tracey Ullman? and it is. I tried really hard last night to explain to my kids how funny she always was, but they don't know her. I had to resort to showing them the photo in this book of her knitted dreadlocks. Now that really cheered me up, especially the looks on their faces when I said I was planning to make some for myself.

Abandoned Books

There were several in the last week.

Two Lives by Vikram Seth. I thought this looked good when I picked it up at Borders one day. It's the kind of thing I like: family memoir, and it's about India! And England! Oh well. Boring boring boring.

The Doctor's Wife by Elizabeth Brundage. This wasn't boring, but it was violent. Within the first 30 pages or so we had a brutal beating, and a body burned beyond recognition. Also hints of more nastiness to come. Not for me, thank you.

On Beauty by Zadie Smith. I don't like Zadie Smith. There, I've said it. I think her dialogue is unnatural and her characters cartoon-like. This reads like a sitcom setup.

Zia at Nom de Plume also recently abandoned a bunch of books, some of which I had already abandoned last year (Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, also abandoned by my son, so that poor book doesn't ever seem to get finished, does it?). Also check out the conversation in her comments about the new term "blogflog." Is that what I'm doing in this post?