reading log two

the first half of Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood I'm teaching this next week so I'm reading it again for that reason. I'm really up and down with this novel. Since I last read it, I read two other Atwood novels that people recommend, Cat's Eye and The Handmaid's Tale, and found them both a bit verbally slipshod and slapdash, a bit paint-by-numbers women's literature, and a bit imagistically brilliant, dense and surprising. I'm going to have to make up my mind about AG sufficently to conduct discussions about it without lapsing into self-indulgent waverings during the silent stretches.

That's about all I managed this week, other than the first few pages of a couple of Mr and Mrs Darcy turned detective at country house party murders novels, and a short play by Athol Fugard, Statements after an Arrest under the Immorality Act , which came in a book I bought because it contained another play.