Well, that was a disappointment. I’m not sure what’s going on with Bujold, but her recent books have been well off her peak. Beguilement is essentially a romance novel disguised as a fantasy, and nothing happens for three-quarters of the book. It’s front-loaded: at the beginning, we get a lot of fantasy-adventure, and the rest of it (all three hundred pages) consists of the protagonists falling in love and having sexual escapades. I wonder why this wasn’t a standalone novel; it’s plain that Bujold wrote most of this book as filler, and given its modest length (360 pages) it seems unlikely that the book would have been “too long” if it were printed as one volume. It’s a shame. The characters are likeable and the world is interesting, but I can’t muster any enthusiasm for the the second volume.
At one point in my life, I felt it a sort of Solemn Duty to finish every book I began, no matter how dismal I found it. Oddly enough, I think going to college and majoring in English cured me of that; good luck getting through that degree if you insist on reading everything you’re assigned. That said, there’s always a little bit of a guilty feeling when I decide to put a book to the side.
Okay, I’m not a fan of romance novels. In fact, I’m going to take the risk of offending a few people who will read this by saying that romance novels are basically pornography for women. Considering that my grandmother owned hundreds of the damnable things, this is a little bit horrifying. She liked the cheap ones, where all the coverart is of a pirate, cowboy, or gangster with a woman whose breasts are barely concealed by her blouse. The implications for the psychology of this are probably damning. (Why do books by and for women feature breasts as a prominent point on the cover, anyway?) There is a style of novel, however, whose treatment of love is more interesting. I can’t call it a “genre,” because it doesn’t seem particularly internally consistent, so let’s call them “stories of attachment.” Most people have read or encountered these in some form. Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a particularly good example of the type.
My Summer will involve a lot of reading. This can partially be blamed on the Southern heat. Although I fully expect to take several medals in the “complaining about the heat” and “sprinting from the air-conditioned car to the air-conditioned building” events this summer, the most satisfying method of coping may be reading a book in front of an air conditioner vent while drinking ice-water. In light of this ambitious vacation planning, I’ve begun to line up my reading schedule, and thought it might be a fun way to inaugurate the “real” posts on the new blog.
After years of looking at the same WordPress theme, I finally got off my tail and edited it. Well, demolished it, actually. I’ve left the land of WordPress behind, folks, and struck out on the strange road towards blosxom. If you were subscribed to me via RSS, well, you’re out of luck now. (And I guess I’ve probably lost a reader. Oops.)