In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 27th Year, Week 29/52

Seven books last week!  That's 25th February to the 2nd March.  Bluebeard's Egg and Breakfast at Tiffany's are both library books.  I didn't enjoy Breakfast at Tiffany's because I didn't like Holly Golightly.  She's an annoying little twit and quite self-centred.  Bluebeard's Egg had some interesting stories but like most of Atwood's stories they didn't have a lot of plot.  I like plot.  Plot is awesome.  I enjoy books with plot.  You can do many excellent things without a lot of plot, such as examining situations and thinking about them.  But I quite like when things actually happen.

The Seventh Pan Book of Horror Stories did have plots.  Most of the stories were pretty Victorian, as it was published in the sixties and included a lot of Victorian work.  I found there wasn't a lot of build-up; most of the stories simply explained the horror and that was the end of it.

I did enjoy the short story by Harry Harrison in the collection, moreso than The Stainless Steel Rat.  It was okay, just not the sort of thing I normally go for; a cyberpunk piracy and conman story.

Memoirs of a Geisha is a book I've returned to over and over in the past decade.  This was the first time I'd listened to the audiobook, which I enjoyed once I'd gotten used to the voice.  I like listening to books on 3x speed; it makes longer books much more accessible.  Which is how I finished the Harry Potter series, though it did make me cry on the bus.

In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 26th Year, Week 23/52

Only four books this week; two that have been clogging up my unread pile for years, an old favourite and the last Horror High.

Deadly Rumours was originally published as The Dead Girlfriend, which I've not actually read before.  It's eighties teen horror and I love that.

Geisha, a Life is the autobiography of Mineko Iwasaki, who provided some of the information behind Memoirs of a Geisha.  I liked Memoirs, so when I saw it in a charity shop, I bought it.  That was several years, perhaps a decade, ago.  I finally read it, and I really liked it.  Mineko Iwasaki was the most successful geisha in Japan, and she goes into a lot of detail here. 

Nation is a Pratchett novel I've loved since it was released.  It was the audiobook I listened to, which is a fairly recent purchase.  The performance doesn't distract from the story, though it doesn't enhance it as much as Blair Brown's performance as Rose Madder does.

Finally, The Little Friend.  I finally finished the fucking thing, after making myself read twenty-five pages a day.  The main character is a bratty pain-in-the-arse who decides to go about causing trouble because she thinks she's in Harriet the Spy.  I very sincerely wanted her to go away and stop making poor Danny's life worse.  What an unpleasant child.  The novel also lacks catharsis, which I consider to be a major crime.