suspiciously specific denial - Books!

A long-overdue books entry!

I recently finished a few things.
Snobs by Julian Fellowes was an interesting fluff read about a class in Britain and one woman who marries across class lines. It's not at all Cindarella-esque and is pretty upfront about the heroine's goals as a social climber.

E.M. Forester's A Room with a View is sort of like Jane Austen meets D.H. Lawrence. It reads largely like a Victorian-ish novel with odd postmodern intrusions and a more psychological perspective on the heroine. The reader is, as far as I could tell, supposed to dislike many of the characters, which makes for some unpleasant moments, but the shift around who you dislike is an interesting one.

The Partly-Cloudy Patriot by Sarah Vowell was an interesting collection of essays about the U.S. and the life of the young liberal author, who makes her living writing music reviews. The writing is interesting and varied -- her topics include Lincoln, September 11, North Dakota, and nerds (a group of which she proclaims herself a member). The audiobook version has both bad points (the voice of the author, who is also the reader, is a bit nasal) and good ones (incidental music by They Might Be Giants).

David Sedaris's Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim is another set of creative non-fiction essays which are somehow both brutally honest about growing up as a gay social outcast in a working-class family in the South and hilariously funny.

I'm almost done with Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, which is interesting, but sort of self-centered in a "the theory Roger Penrose and I proved showed that" kind of way, and not terribly engaging as science reads go.