Not too fast on the pages this month.
Feb. 1st, 2009 02:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
roadrunnertwice(All Two of the) Things I Read During January
Nick brain is dead; no can read. See below.
Poppy Z. Brite - D*U*C*K (1/26)
I was trying to figure out what to call this book—was it a novella, a novelette, a fuck you I'm not counting the words in this thing—and it occurred to me that, independent of its form, it was kind of like a children's book for grown-ups. It's light and fluffy; the characters don't face much in the way of overwhelming troubles, and it doesn't really go anywhere particularly exciting. It reminded me of a bunch of mostly-forgotten kids' books where people come up with a project, and they do stuff, and then it's the end. And there is extensive description of food.
I don't know if it was exactly what I needed right now, but it was pretty darn close. My brain seems to be recompiling important modules from source or something, and I am almost completely incapable of reading fiction right now; a rather specific part of my attention span is fried, and I can't seem to hold narrative threads in my short-term memory for the length of the page they're on.
(It's irritating timing. I'm about a third of the way from the end of Return of the King, and literally cannot progress any further in it; I've also got an enormous queue of books lined up on my shelf, since that's basically what my family got me for Christmas, and theoretically have the free time I'd need to start plowing through it. And plus, Robert's reading Lolita right now, and I wanted to play book-club with him. No dice, though.)
Anyway, point is: it's precisely the right time to read something fluffy and character-based and largely plotless and kind of hand-holding and not particularly subtle. Cheers, D*U*C*K.
Thomas Geoghegan - See You in Court (1/31; skimmed/skipped large portions)
May have mentioned this guy before; he's that labor lawyer running for Congress out in Chicago.
Anyway, his thesis in this book is that the more the Rule of Law goes down the shitter (and he uses a fairly broad definition of the Rule of Law here; many of the things he's talking about involve the effective disappearance of contract law and trust law as practiced in the mid-20th Century), the more the nation's resources get tied up in an insane thicket of torts. The mechanic he posits is that basically, as the Rule of Law goes south, ordinary people experience the law as more and more arbitrary and unfair, which takes away any incentive to play by the rules. Build a society where there's no way to get yours save for torts, and you're going to get a shit-ton of torts.
Well, that's basically what he's saying. The devil being in the details, there's a lot in here, much of it having to do with the destruction of organized labor over the last 40 years or so. Complicated and kind of staggering and scary stuff. He seems to have his head on straight, though, and I'm glad he's shooting for a position where he'll be able to maybe do something about some of it.
Oh god I'm now three months behind on these.
Date: 2009-02-02 02:03 am (UTC)The guy who wrote Gothic: 400 years . . . seemed to be madly obsessed with Brite, so I've been thinking of checking out her work for a while. If the fluffiness is enjoyable and not Tor.com download level of treacle, I'm in.
You're totally allowed to declare bankruptcy on these, btw.
Date: 2009-02-02 07:07 am (UTC)Quick heads-up on Brite: she has both a Gothic horror career and a pop fiction about restaurant owners career (D*U*C*K was an artifact of the latter), which can result in surprise if one is browsing the web catalog rather than the shelves.