I woke up this morning with an overwhelming sense of incompetence. I haven’t really managed to do anything I have recently set out to do: write a scholarly paper, quit smoking, clear up my library’s archives, do some job applications, keep up with this blog. It’s not like I have scads of readers out there wondering why I haven’t posted….But, anyway, I thought I would at least try to get something on here.
Sorry for the self-pity. I seem to be in a rut and can’t quite make it out.
I spent a good deal of time earlier today looking at library-related blogs. I’m adding a couple to my blog roll.
A couple of days ago I read a recent best-selling thriller, Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44. Really, really fun. Okay, so maybe fun isn’t quite the word because it is has some strong violence and the paranoid discomfort of life in 1950s Soviet Union. Smith stretches the limits of my tolerance with an ending that seems incongruously bright. This really is in the last three pages or so, a hollywood-ish it-all-works-out-in-the-end scene that very well could have been demanded by a publisher/editor who needed a little relief from the black and bafflingly arbitrary world of a totalitarian regime. But, Smith can be forgiven, even if he did write those last pages this way himself. Certain plot points are a bit outlandish, but when isn’t that the case for a thriller? Unlike many too many popular thrillers the writing here is well-honed and tight, the characters thoroughly believable. Oh, and a loosely-based-on-a-true-story serial killer, too. What’s not to love?
3 Comments
July 4, 2008 at 2:31 am
been wondering how you are doing… i am one of your loyal readers, even if i don’t always coment!
July 4, 2008 at 6:42 pm
Hey, incompetence and self-doubt are the life blood of many a blog!
July 5, 2008 at 12:50 am
I may have mentioned it to you before, but Dorothea Salo’s Caveat Lector is library-blog awesomeness, albeit with a tech-n-repository-heavy focus that might not be entirely your cup of tea. But check out what she has to say about librariana, which is all super-smart stuff. And I’ve had a blog-crush on library-blogger Amanda at Household Opera for a long time.