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After I returned to the hotel last night from watching "Back to the Future" and DMC (more on that in a bit) with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
araestel, I finally finished reading Atonement by Ian McEwan. It's taken forever, both because of my habit of reading 2-3 things at once, and rather slower of late, and because it's just such a slow story, at least in the beginning.
The principal characters (there are others, but these matter for plot) are Briony, Cecilia, Robbie, Lola, and Paul. This story spans Briony's lifetime from ages 13 to 77, with a rapid jump between 13 and 18, and between 18 and 77. Cecilia is her older sister, Robbie is their family's housekeeper's son - both are 10 years older than Briony - Lola is Briony's cousin, and Paul is an older, rich man they all meet when Briony is 13 and Lola is 16. This takes place in the 1930s in Britain.
( Plot summary/spoilers )
I still want to see the movie, and that's what made me buy the book first back in December. The first half is extremely slow - it's like a mood piece, and you have to have patience, as it seems sometimes that McEwan is going to describe the petal of every last flower blooming around the Tallis family's (Cecilia and Briony) estate. The action picks up in the second half, but I really like plot and characterization and there are times even here that I feel McEwan is giving me too much setting as a means of padding the book. The whole novel has sort of a sleepy, passive feel to it, which may be the point, since when you get to the end, you're sort of jarred out of it by the "epilogue." It did make me lay awake and think about it for a good while after I finished reading, so maybe that's the point.
The other book I'm still reading is Sex, Time, and Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution by Leonard Shlain, a surgeon. I'm not even halfway through, and since it's hypothesis and science and not a narrative, I'm not certain what some of his points even are just yet. But overall, he's pointing out how it was the female who decided the evolutionary traits direction of the human race by her ability to discriminate about whom she mates with. The chapters are pretty interesting so far, as he talks a lot about female physiology and how humans are unique in several respects among females in the animal kingdom - "hidden" ovulation and menstruation and orgasm (which he points out isn't at all common even among mammals), walking upright and how it affected vagina and uterus placement, needing assistance giving birth, ability to sync menstruation with other female humans (and his theory about how that helped shape society and romantic partnerships because instead of men having a smorgasbord of receptive ovulating females anytime he wanted sex, if the females around him and each other ovulated at the same time, he would have to narrow his selection and behave himself around them in-between so they would have sex with him again when they were ready). He also touches on nutrition and iron loss (it seems women have several drains on them of this mineral, and how that is unique among even mammalian females) and how he thinks the quest to stop female iron loss helped shape human society.
(Edited for godawful spelling.)
( A few fannish thoughts on DMC )
araestel, I finally finished reading Atonement by Ian McEwan. It's taken forever, both because of my habit of reading 2-3 things at once, and rather slower of late, and because it's just such a slow story, at least in the beginning.The principal characters (there are others, but these matter for plot) are Briony, Cecilia, Robbie, Lola, and Paul. This story spans Briony's lifetime from ages 13 to 77, with a rapid jump between 13 and 18, and between 18 and 77. Cecilia is her older sister, Robbie is their family's housekeeper's son - both are 10 years older than Briony - Lola is Briony's cousin, and Paul is an older, rich man they all meet when Briony is 13 and Lola is 16. This takes place in the 1930s in Britain.
( Plot summary/spoilers )
I still want to see the movie, and that's what made me buy the book first back in December. The first half is extremely slow - it's like a mood piece, and you have to have patience, as it seems sometimes that McEwan is going to describe the petal of every last flower blooming around the Tallis family's (Cecilia and Briony) estate. The action picks up in the second half, but I really like plot and characterization and there are times even here that I feel McEwan is giving me too much setting as a means of padding the book. The whole novel has sort of a sleepy, passive feel to it, which may be the point, since when you get to the end, you're sort of jarred out of it by the "epilogue." It did make me lay awake and think about it for a good while after I finished reading, so maybe that's the point.
The other book I'm still reading is Sex, Time, and Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution by Leonard Shlain, a surgeon. I'm not even halfway through, and since it's hypothesis and science and not a narrative, I'm not certain what some of his points even are just yet. But overall, he's pointing out how it was the female who decided the evolutionary traits direction of the human race by her ability to discriminate about whom she mates with. The chapters are pretty interesting so far, as he talks a lot about female physiology and how humans are unique in several respects among females in the animal kingdom - "hidden" ovulation and menstruation and orgasm (which he points out isn't at all common even among mammals), walking upright and how it affected vagina and uterus placement, needing assistance giving birth, ability to sync menstruation with other female humans (and his theory about how that helped shape society and romantic partnerships because instead of men having a smorgasbord of receptive ovulating females anytime he wanted sex, if the females around him and each other ovulated at the same time, he would have to narrow his selection and behave himself around them in-between so they would have sex with him again when they were ready). He also touches on nutrition and iron loss (it seems women have several drains on them of this mineral, and how that is unique among even mammalian females) and how he thinks the quest to stop female iron loss helped shape human society.
(Edited for godawful spelling.)
( A few fannish thoughts on DMC )
