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thanateIn the midst of bookshelf rotations and various other things, I have been reading Mary Roach's Stiff. Probably mostly because I've run out of Ilona Andrews's Magic [Verbs] series, which was also recommended by several mostly unrelated people on the internet (a different set than the Mary Roach book) and I'm still trying to decide if I went through them like a tray of brownies because they're good, or because I was very much in the mood for that sort of fluff. Either way, I recommend them for being urban fantasy that managed to avoid almost all the things that irritate me about urban fantasy. The last few were disappointingly "and now we need a bigger, more horrible threat than the last book!" but the characters are good and complex and their arcs actually go places rather than all being about unresolvable romantic tensions. Also, I like her vampires. (They're non-sentient.)
Anyway, Mary Roach... I find her book on dead bodies weird and somewhat disturbing not because it's about dead bodies, but because of the authorial voice. She goes out of her way to come across as potty and obnoxious; half the time she mentions talking to a new person she has to tell us that no, she wasn't actually *invited* as such, she just bothered so-&-so until s/he agreed to let her come and sit in on this other kind of dissection. I think the other people who've talked about this mostly interpreted it as an attempt to soothe the reader regarding the subject matter, but to me it comes across as obnoxious lady trying to pass off her obnoxiousness as being quirky and I get the feeling that she would also titter irritatingly and then I would want to punch her. Which may have colored my interpretation of the bit where she goes haring off into the "wilds" of non-english-speaking China because someone on the internet posted some kind story about cannibalism... because I could totally see her doing that anywhere. Besides, she starts off telling us in the introduction that we call our food "beef" rather than "cow" as a distancing tactic, which is not linguistically true either. (It's the anglo/norman divide again... the people raising the animal got to name it, and the people feasting on it named the food.) If she gets something I knew in high school wrong right up front, there's got to be stuff I'm missing, too. So, I'm not too impressed by the consistency of her research techniques and annoyed by the authorial voice, but I'm also on the next to last chapter, so it must be readable. Some parts interesting and some kind of ghastly, as advertised. Next read will involve something that doesn't have any primate experimentation in it. I think that's just about everything else in the house at the moment, so I should be safe.
Xposty from dreamwidth.
Anyway, Mary Roach... I find her book on dead bodies weird and somewhat disturbing not because it's about dead bodies, but because of the authorial voice. She goes out of her way to come across as potty and obnoxious; half the time she mentions talking to a new person she has to tell us that no, she wasn't actually *invited* as such, she just bothered so-&-so until s/he agreed to let her come and sit in on this other kind of dissection. I think the other people who've talked about this mostly interpreted it as an attempt to soothe the reader regarding the subject matter, but to me it comes across as obnoxious lady trying to pass off her obnoxiousness as being quirky and I get the feeling that she would also titter irritatingly and then I would want to punch her. Which may have colored my interpretation of the bit where she goes haring off into the "wilds" of non-english-speaking China because someone on the internet posted some kind story about cannibalism... because I could totally see her doing that anywhere. Besides, she starts off telling us in the introduction that we call our food "beef" rather than "cow" as a distancing tactic, which is not linguistically true either. (It's the anglo/norman divide again... the people raising the animal got to name it, and the people feasting on it named the food.) If she gets something I knew in high school wrong right up front, there's got to be stuff I'm missing, too. So, I'm not too impressed by the consistency of her research techniques and annoyed by the authorial voice, but I'm also on the next to last chapter, so it must be readable. Some parts interesting and some kind of ghastly, as advertised. Next read will involve something that doesn't have any primate experimentation in it. I think that's just about everything else in the house at the moment, so I should be safe.
Xposty from dreamwidth.