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Sep. 22nd, 2005 11:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desayunoencamaI know better.
I even stopped, as I was about to leave the apartment, and turned back to look at my shelves and shelves of books to be read.
But I was already leaving the apartment late, and in the face of such stress couldn't pick what else I might want to read.
Of course, the decision process was also limited, not just by what titles I had available, but things I didn't plan to pass along to Sara or another friend when I'd read them, something I could bring to NYC and abandon there.
So I left with only Mike Gayle's DINNER FOR TWO, which I had started reading a few days earlier and had made very little headway with. I had quite liked his MR. COMMITMENT, but hated his best-known (and best-seller) MY LEGENDARY GIRLFRIEND.
I justified leaving with only one book (even though I've written articles advising people always to have a back-up book, especially in the current travle climate where delays are not uncommon) by telling myself that I would a) work (ha!) and b) sleep (mostly on the flight from Amsterdam to NYC, or that's the plan).
And what happens, but I wind up finishing DINNER FOR TWO before I even land in Amsterdam.
Oops.
So I had to buy an expensive import-priced novel at the airport shop. While I still haven't finished Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander series, after some deliberation (the 6th Alexander McCall Smith Botswana book? the new hardcover P.D. Jame sin its expensive UK edition?) I settled on an entry from Mankell's new series, featuring Wallander's daughter, BEFORE THE FROST.
And now that I'm sitting down typing this during my 5 hour layover (sigh), I'm dropping with fatigue.
Doubtful I'll get much work or reading done in the hours I have to wait until the flight for NYC leaves.
Afraid to nap and oversleep my flight.
###
Continued after arrival in NYC, when I can finally post the above which was written in Schipol airport.
The Mankell was only 470 pages so I finished that, too. Not sure if I liked it. It's not really a Linda Wallander book, or at least that's not an accurate way to think of the books; it's still half her father.
And it was a thriller, not a traditional mystery. I don't likebooks where we're in the mind of some psycopath every few chapters, and the reader knows things that the detective doesn't, so we know how time is running out for them to get a clue and solve things before all the diabolic plans, etc.
Not my cuppa.
Although I like the father-daughter relationship. And actually, the book is not so dark as many of Mankell's other novels. Because the "dark" elements are not personal demons of the detective (as in the Kurt Wandell mysteries I've read so far) but rather external (and hence less meaningful, more distant) done-to-death religious cult psychopaths yawn yawn (and not just from lack of sleep).
Anyway, I'll know better in future not to let myself leave home so unprepared again.
I even stopped, as I was about to leave the apartment, and turned back to look at my shelves and shelves of books to be read.
But I was already leaving the apartment late, and in the face of such stress couldn't pick what else I might want to read.
Of course, the decision process was also limited, not just by what titles I had available, but things I didn't plan to pass along to Sara or another friend when I'd read them, something I could bring to NYC and abandon there.
So I left with only Mike Gayle's DINNER FOR TWO, which I had started reading a few days earlier and had made very little headway with. I had quite liked his MR. COMMITMENT, but hated his best-known (and best-seller) MY LEGENDARY GIRLFRIEND.
I justified leaving with only one book (even though I've written articles advising people always to have a back-up book, especially in the current travle climate where delays are not uncommon) by telling myself that I would a) work (ha!) and b) sleep (mostly on the flight from Amsterdam to NYC, or that's the plan).
And what happens, but I wind up finishing DINNER FOR TWO before I even land in Amsterdam.
Oops.
So I had to buy an expensive import-priced novel at the airport shop. While I still haven't finished Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander series, after some deliberation (the 6th Alexander McCall Smith Botswana book? the new hardcover P.D. Jame sin its expensive UK edition?) I settled on an entry from Mankell's new series, featuring Wallander's daughter, BEFORE THE FROST.
And now that I'm sitting down typing this during my 5 hour layover (sigh), I'm dropping with fatigue.
Doubtful I'll get much work or reading done in the hours I have to wait until the flight for NYC leaves.
Afraid to nap and oversleep my flight.
###
Continued after arrival in NYC, when I can finally post the above which was written in Schipol airport.
The Mankell was only 470 pages so I finished that, too. Not sure if I liked it. It's not really a Linda Wallander book, or at least that's not an accurate way to think of the books; it's still half her father.
And it was a thriller, not a traditional mystery. I don't likebooks where we're in the mind of some psycopath every few chapters, and the reader knows things that the detective doesn't, so we know how time is running out for them to get a clue and solve things before all the diabolic plans, etc.
Not my cuppa.
Although I like the father-daughter relationship. And actually, the book is not so dark as many of Mankell's other novels. Because the "dark" elements are not personal demons of the detective (as in the Kurt Wandell mysteries I've read so far) but rather external (and hence less meaningful, more distant) done-to-death religious cult psychopaths yawn yawn (and not just from lack of sleep).
Anyway, I'll know better in future not to let myself leave home so unprepared again.
