Friday, December 24, 2010

I'm SUCH a last-minute gal

In that I was asked to submit something for the Advent Book Blog at the beginning of the month, but between early deadlines and advent-ish doings, I only just got around to it on Tuesday.

Heh.

Besides my last-minute-ness, I also wanted to take the time to think about what I would specifically recommend from last year's reading, which wasn't as wide or as deep as I would have liked.

Which never is, come to think of it, between the have-to read books (for articles and reviews) and the books I read for research purposes, depending on what I'm writing at that moment.

In any event/advent, here's the text-only version of my recommendation, specifically of Harry Karlinsky's The Evolution of Inanimate Objects (Insomniac Press, 2010).
The Evolution of Inanimate Objects is a book that rattles the cutlery drawer of your brain...in that it is the story of a psychiatrist named Harry Karlinsky discovering that Charles Darwin’s youngest son Thomas was confined to a London, ON asylum in 1879 for his theory on the evolution of eating utensils. Except that Harry Karlinsky is a novelist in addition to being a (real) psychiatrist. And Thomas Darwin is a theory of Karlinsky’s, his history cobbled together from bits and pieces of his (real) siblings’ lives. Read it alongside the recent biography-in-verse by Ruth Padel (Darwin’s great-great-granddaughter) and you’ll get really confused. And amused. And maybe even a tiny bit sad for poor addled (unreal) Thomas and his fistful of forks.
I say text-only, because the recommendation over at the Advent Book Blog is an audio recommendation (!).

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