I’m almost finished with all of the books I received for Christmas. I currently have around 75 pages left to read in Alisdair Gray’s Poor Things and then I have to read Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson and I will be without reading material once again. Here is what I read while my site was wigged out:
In the Forests of Serre is another excellent work by Patricia McKillip. She seems to take her usual style and present it a bit more primitively. I mean, it seems closer to a Russo-Finnish fairy tale [complete with a witch who carries her house on her back] than other things she has written. On the Other Hand, The Tower at Stony Wood has a Celtic triple-goddess in it, so maybe this is a layer I have missed in the past. This book doesn’t really have a villain as a main character. There is an ogrish king, but he is a minor character.
Alphabet of Thorn is another Patricia McKillip work, just as good as all her others. She is nothing if not consistent. Anyway, this one incorporates myth and story and time into a tale about an orphan. I can’t say much more about this one without giving away important information. Anything she writes is worth a read.
Eats, Shoots and Leaves is as interesting as a book on punctuation is likely to get. It was a mildly enjoyable read that ended up giving me some easy rules to remember for the punctuation confusions that I give myself. She freely admits that many of her recommendations are debatable and she does ramble on at times. I skipped the last chapter because the only parts that were really interesting were the discussions of the punctuation marks themselves.