Reading Wednesday 3/10

Recently read

Bring up the bodies by Hilary Mantel. (c) Tertius Enterprises 2012, Pub 2012 Fourth Estate, ISBN 978-000747735-7

All systems red by Martha Wells. (c) Martha Wells 2017 , Pub 2017 Tor.com, ISBN 978-0-7653-9752-2

The wonderful O by James Thurber. (c) The Estate of James Thurber 1958, published Puffin Books 1974, ISBN 0-1403-0180-1

( detailed reviews )

Currently reading: How to be both by Ali Smith. I'd been looking forward to this for ages because I really loved Girl meets boy, and I bought it new when it came out and then was never quite in the mood for it. So far I'm finding it very impressive, but also quite hard going. It's kind of balanced on the edge between prose and poetry, which is something that Smith handles well, and it's about a teenaged girl coping with the sudden death of her mother. Some absolutely pitch-perfect observations of both characters and situations, but it still somehow feels a bit more like work than leisure reading. Also it's set in Cambridge and there's a lovely description of the sculpture at the end of the DNA path:

It resembled a joyful bedspring or a bespoke ladder. It was like a kind of shout, if a shout to the sky could be said to look like something. It looked like the opposite of history [...] What if history, instead, was that shout, that upward spring, that staircase-ladder thing, and everybody was just used to calling something quite different the word history?

Up next: Honestly not sure, I don't really have anything queued at the moment, and I think How to be both is going to be slow going. Something where nobody dies, I think.