Slammed by Libby
Jan. 5th, 2021 04:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
breakinglight11I really do love the Libby app. If you haven't tried it, it's the app of the local public library system, and I highly recommend it. I love how it's helped me get back into serious book-reading in the last year, and its quick and easy access to the world of reading has helped me fall back in love with the wonder of libraries. But it has this tendency of delivering all the books I have on hold at once, so I hardly have time to read them before my loan runs out and they get passed along to the next person. So, if I don't want to get kicked to the end of the hold line, sometimes I end up trying to read several at once. To... varying levels of success.
After a nearly four-month wait, I finally got The Color of Magic, the first of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. I'd been told it's not quite as clever and deep as some of his later works, but I enjoyed Guards! Guards! and Men at Arms enough to want to read the rest of the series regardless. This one is cute and cleverly written, and I'm enjoying the parodies of familiar fantasy tropes. I'm about two-thirds of the way through, when Libby informs me that Mary Beard's SPQR has come available.
SPQR is a fairly dense nonfiction book on Roman history, one I've wanted to read for years, and occurred to me to put on my holds list in September. Fortunately the one I got was the audiobook, which is read by a pleasantly plummy-voiced British narrator that I could listen to while going about much of my day. I'm enjoying it very much, with its emphasis on meta-analysis of where our historical perspectives on Rome come from, and very interesting cultural context about what the myths ancient Romans regarded as history (Romulus, Aeneas, et cetera) reveal about them as a society. I'm not sure why it starts with an anecdote about the consul race between Cicero and Catiline— maybe as an example of how much of what we know about ancient Roman happenings come from people talking about their own involvement in them, and have at least some bias? —and then immediately goes into founding myths, but it's very good so far.
Then, of course, Mary Renault's The King Must Die comes available. I started reading this grounded narrative of the early life of Theseus several months ago. I'd wanted to since I was a kid, recommended as it was by the creator of Gargoyles, but my library back then didn't have it. I began it delightedly, and was especially happy that I think its style might be informative for how I could reshape my Adonis novel— something I really have to get back to revising sometime soon. But I only got about 15% in before it came time to shoot for the digital Hawking shows at Arisia 2021, and it took so much time that I put reading on hold. My loan lapsed before I could finish. But now that it's available again, I didn't want to wait a bunch more months, so I'm going to try to read it in parallel with The Color of Magic.
This is a lot for a short period. But at least it will get me closer to my reading goal!
After a nearly four-month wait, I finally got The Color of Magic, the first of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. I'd been told it's not quite as clever and deep as some of his later works, but I enjoyed Guards! Guards! and Men at Arms enough to want to read the rest of the series regardless. This one is cute and cleverly written, and I'm enjoying the parodies of familiar fantasy tropes. I'm about two-thirds of the way through, when Libby informs me that Mary Beard's SPQR has come available.
SPQR is a fairly dense nonfiction book on Roman history, one I've wanted to read for years, and occurred to me to put on my holds list in September. Fortunately the one I got was the audiobook, which is read by a pleasantly plummy-voiced British narrator that I could listen to while going about much of my day. I'm enjoying it very much, with its emphasis on meta-analysis of where our historical perspectives on Rome come from, and very interesting cultural context about what the myths ancient Romans regarded as history (Romulus, Aeneas, et cetera) reveal about them as a society. I'm not sure why it starts with an anecdote about the consul race between Cicero and Catiline— maybe as an example of how much of what we know about ancient Roman happenings come from people talking about their own involvement in them, and have at least some bias? —and then immediately goes into founding myths, but it's very good so far.
Then, of course, Mary Renault's The King Must Die comes available. I started reading this grounded narrative of the early life of Theseus several months ago. I'd wanted to since I was a kid, recommended as it was by the creator of Gargoyles, but my library back then didn't have it. I began it delightedly, and was especially happy that I think its style might be informative for how I could reshape my Adonis novel— something I really have to get back to revising sometime soon. But I only got about 15% in before it came time to shoot for the digital Hawking shows at Arisia 2021, and it took so much time that I put reading on hold. My loan lapsed before I could finish. But now that it's available again, I didn't want to wait a bunch more months, so I'm going to try to read it in parallel with The Color of Magic.
This is a lot for a short period. But at least it will get me closer to my reading goal!
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Date: 2021-01-11 07:36 pm (UTC)Yeah -- Kate hits this frequently, with 3-5 of her on-hold books arriving in the span of a few days. (The usual result being a warning to me that she's going to be spending the weekend reading.)
A tradition that seems to have continued afterwards. The oldest single book I own is a 1671 tome of Roman history -- I can't actually read it (it's in Latin), but the online translations are fascinating. The Historiae Augustae is a history of the Roman emperors that is full of WTFery -- citing apparently fake documents, involving commentary that seems to be basically a hoax, and just generally making stuff up. It's delightfully weird...