Sunday, June 2, 2019

Rainbow Pile-Up

I thought I might try Instagram a little more (more than the very little I have), specifically to see #books.
It's cheering to see what's out there! 

31,956,419 posts at #bookstagram, for instance, www.instagram.com/explore/tags/bookstagram

They're mostly of the moment, "this is what I'm reading" photos, lots from of young people, and from around the world. (Fun to try to recognize books with translated titles.)

June is Pride month, and there seems to be a prompt, or just a catchy idea, to arrange books by rainbow colors.

I decided to try with books from my bookshelves. Turns out a lot of spines are not solid colors... but I managed a decent pile up.


I didn't finish Milkman, which won the 2018 Booker. It has a nice spine color, but the book itself I didn't care for. It's so interior--from inside a young woman's head––I felt like my own head was in a box. 
That's fitting for the subject––a young woman being sexually stalked and living in a stifling political climate (Belfast, presumably)––but I couldn't stand it and stopped reading.

Verdict: would have been a great short story.

I keep reading novels that would be better as short stories, or as short novels.
(Or so I think. I'd like a good abridgement of Dickens, for instance. Cut out his interminable frippery. I started out strong but quickly faltered, reading A Tale of Two Cities.)


Penelope Fitzgerald's Human Voices, a book in the yellow section above, is a favorite of mine.  Admirably compact in idea and execution.

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