book report

So, I actually finished a book for once, that being the one I alerted you earlier, The Bride and the Bachelors. I guess the last chapter, the one on Merce Cunningham, was added for the later edition that I had, and wasn't in the original run, and it sort of shows, like in the time between writing the first edition and writing the Cunningham piece, Tomkins lost his ability to write with any sense of tension whatsoever. The entire book was "eh-ok," methinks, and I wasn't blown away by the writing style the way I expected to be, but by the end it was really feeling like something a high schooler had written: lots of "this happened, and then that happened, and then . . . that was it!" No killer scenes that told me anything about Cunningham (the one person profiled whom I knew the least about), no rewarding endings.

Next on the docket: Lost for Words: The Hidden History of the Oxford English Dictionary. It was written by Lynda Mugglestone, who has a wonderful name.