Recent reading

[luzula]

Ask the Dust by John Fante
For book-club-at-work. Meeeeh. Apparently this is a classic? It's about a guy who is poor but convinced that he is the next Great American Writer. He has sex with a randomly-appearing woman and writes a book about it. Also there's a girl who he meets because she's a waitress at a bar and he spends the evening negging her about her shoes. Sorry, I'm probably not doing this justice, but it was just not for me.

The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope
A Tam Lin story set in Elizabethan England. I quite liked this! It has a likeable protagonist and an interesting take on fairies. And no rape (in fact no sex; it's a YA book from 1975). I didn't quite buy the romance. Not that I don't think they'd be good together, but more that the story just felt platonic and gen to me and I didn't actually think there was going to be any love story until bam at the end. Maybe because it's YA from 1975? And at the end, he never actually asks her if she wants to marry him, he just assumes!

It amused me that the cover has leaves of American red oak, rather than European oak.../o\

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

I love that you catch the arborial errors.

(And anyone negging on anybody's shoes is just worth dumping in my experience.)

[skygiants]

Hah, it's often Perilous Gard-style YA love stories that are the ones I become most invested in, probably because I grew up on Perilous Gard and similar books as a child. So little instant attraction, so much talking and challenging each other to be better people!

[riverlight]

Have you read The Sherwood Ring, Pope's other YA novel? It's one of my absolute favorites. I adore The Perilous Gard, but the Sherwood Ring is THE BEST.

[brigantine]

Oh, I see - N. American oaks tend to have points on their leaves, regardless of the overall shape, whereas the English oak has rounded leaves. I mean, not round leaves, but rounded, um, lobes? Is that the right term?

[luzula]

Heh, my flatmate shook her head and told me this was the result of knowing too much.

[luzula]

I do like their relationship and the way they challenge each other! And I agree on not being into books with instant physical attraction, it's just that I didn't see any physical attraction at all even later, so it just felt like it came out of the blue when they were getting married. I do feel that they will have a wonderful time together reconstructing that manor land, though.

Like, if this had been an AU world where marriage was generally accepted to be a platonic relationship, it would have made perfect sense to me.

[luzula]

I haven't, but it's on my list of books to check out--I will bump it up. : )

[luzula]

Yes, that's the idea! I mean, I can't speak for all American oaks being that way. Checking Wikipedia, there seems to be a whole section of such species, though. And certainly no northern European oak species have pointed lobes. (Lobes is probably a good word for it? But I don't know botany terms in English.)