My husband kindly stopped by the library and picked up the books I had ordered. They are…
- Wit’s End by Karen Joy Fowler: I didn’t love The Jane Austen Book Club, which is probably Fowler’s best known work, so I’m not sure if this book is a good choice for me. I think I picked it because I was looking for a different book called Wit’s End and this one came up in the search results, and I said to myself, “What the heck. Why not?” Perhaps I should have looked at the reviews first (they are not good!). Oh, well. I’ll give it a few chapters and see how it goes.
- I is an Other by James Geary: The subtitle of this book is The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World. That sounds right up my alley, and it should be a good companion for some of the other language-related books I’ve been dipping into lately. Geary has also written a book called Wit’s End, which backs up my guess for why I picked the Fowler book.
- The Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers: This book kept coming up on my radar, so I decided to finally take a look at it. I like the title, which is obviously a play on Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The book is physically quite heavy. It’s a dense 638 pages, and that makes me a little leery. Long books are often poorly edited books. According to the jacket flap, it’s a “double love story” that somehow relates to molecular biology. This book was a bestseller of 1991, and it has generally good reviews, but it seems to be a “love it or hate it” kind of book. Apparently, if you love it, you’ll find yourself using words like “awe” to describe your feelings about it afterward. If you don’t love it, then you probably won’t even finish it.
I’m in no mood to read bad books right now. The nice thing about ordering these books from the library is that I have no investment in them. It’s actually in my best interests to return them as soon as possible to guarantee that I don’t pay any overdue fines on them. So, they better win me over quickly or they’re going straight back to the library!