JerryB

  The Changeling - Joy Williams : One of the books I'm "dancing" with these days is Joy Williams's The Changeling, a book that apparently fell into obscurity on the strength of a single influential bad review when it first came out ... enjoying a revival as this new edition attests. I'd better get moving on this one because the library (San DIego Public) isn't going to let me keep it much longer.

  Quilt - Nicholas Royle : This book is a good example of what I mean by "dancing", and of why the traditional mutually-exclusive-and-exhaustive categories of "Have Read / Am Reading / Will (want to) Read" — crudely modeled, it would appear on the categories of "Past/Present/Future" — are inadequate to capture my reading habits. Royle's Quilt: Have I read it? no. Am I reading it? yes and no. I've taken a taste of it ... I've danced with it a bit, and having found it to be rife with all sorts of wordplay I'm just not quite in the mood for right now, I'll set it aside. But now, knowing better just what it is I'd be coming back to, I will come back to it, possibly multiple times, possibly just for a little more "dancing", but (always) possibly to read it through to the end.

  The Arrangement - Sarah Dunn : In the meantime, this other book here caught my promiscuous eye. It's about IPR's: Intentionally Promiscuous Relationships. Have done a preliminary dance with this one, and it looks promising.

  City of Stairs - Robert Jackson Bennett : My mind keeps returning to Robert Jackson Bennett's City of Stairs ... I've begun and re-begun this one several times, and I do want to get back to it, but there's always the concern I must address of potential "interference" with other books I'm dancing with. In this case, I'm concerned about potential interference with Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country, even though their plots are superficially quite different.

  Lovecraft Country - Matt Ruff : This one, unfortunately, has so far been something of a slog ... but I'm sticking with it ... I think ....