QotD: I'm reading (or about to read)...
What books are on your nightstand?
Having just finished Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age this evening [1], I've got the following books queued up next:
All books about food! I guess I'm a bit obsessed.
[1] I'm working my way backwards through Stephenson's stuff, though of course I did read the Baroque Trilogy in the proper order, as doing otherwise would've been fairly silly.
TDA started out a little bit slowly for me--which always tends to be the case more w/ fiction than non-, just because I don't really care that much about anyone in the story, and it has no grounding in reality. But and also I'm not really a fan of science fiction that much--or really, fiction in general--and so it took me about a week to get through the first 75 pages of TDA, because it suffered from some of the typical things that annoy me about science fiction, particularly the overuse of jargon-y language.
But once I told myself to just sit down and fucking read it this weekend, it turned out that I really loved it, as I figured I might. What struck me most about it is how apt its subtitle ("Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer") is--said primer is one of the key items in the book, obviously, but it's also a remarkably apt description of this book, in the way that it's basically a young Victorian woman's saga wrapped up in science fiction garments. Which probably explains why I enjoyed it more than most science fiction.
Comments
if you're into food books, i recommend reading "the man who ate everything" and "it must have been something i ate" by jeffery steingarten. He's a great writer, the books are collections of his column from vogue ,and i wish I had never seen Iron Chef America, because he's an arrogant jackass of a judge on it..