Summer reading pleasures

[intertext]

There's a new Patricia McKillip winging its way to my door courtesy of Amazon.ca, and I've signed up for the "have the new Harry Potter delivered on the day it's released." I did that last time, and it was way cool having a postie bringing it on a _Saturday_, saying "here's your Harry Potter" because they'd been specially signed up JUST FOR THAT. My goodness, the power J.K. Rowling has these days...

Meanwhile I'm reading _Inkheart_ and have to say I'm underwhelmed. Whether it's because of it being in translation, I don't know, but it seems kind of flat. The basic idea is good, but she doesn't exploit it as well as she could have IMHO.

The best thing I've read for a good while is _Cloud Atlas_. I'm intrigued, though. Has anyone else noticed, I wonder, that the new Michael Cunningham sounds very very similar - even to the idea of having nested narratives involving characters from different times who are reincarnated versions of eachother (does that make sense? You get the idea...) There's of course a lot of ballyhoo about the Cunningham - he being the author of _The Hours_ and all - but the parallels do seem a bit strange. Good thing _Cloud Atlas_ has been out for a while or no doubt someone would be accusing the author (and a brain fart prevents me from remembering his name) of copying Cunningham.

Comments

[happy-spinster.livejournal.com]

I'm a dork, so I'm going to show up at my neighborhood bookstore at midnight on the July 16th. I'll probably be halfway through Half-Blood Prince by dawn.

Cloud Atlas--that book left me reeling. I'm still not quite over it, weeks after reading it. I know I'm going to have to go back and re-read it, but it's too soon. I haven't been so overwhelmed by a book in a very long time; I wish I knew more people who would like it. I've since picked up Ghostwritten, but haven't had time to do much more than glance at it.

Being a hermit lately, I hadn't even heard about the new Michael Cunningham, but I'll check it out (probably as I'm standing in line, waiting to buy the next Harry Potter...).

[intertext.livejournal.com]

Oh my! Someone else who has read Cloud Atlas! How wonderful :) Wasn't it amazing? I don't think another book has affected me quite so much since The Bone People (have you read _that_? ...it's another book that will completely cut you off at the knees). I'll probably read the Cunningham out of interest - I liked The Hours quite a bit, thought at risk at sounding like an impossible snob I confess to preferring Mrs. Dalloway. Having read it before The Hours, I appreciated the cleverness of what Cunningham was doing (after all, I do have a thing for intertextuality, ha ha). This latest one apparently has references to Walt Whitman in it, with whom I'm not really familiar, and it's all tied to Sept. 11 somehow, and there's a distopian future section too I think. There was a lukewarm review in this week's Entertainment Weekly (blush - high journalism is not something I go in for).