A few books in a few weeks

I am stricken with some blogatory obligation to write something new. Either I haven't been reading much at all lately, or I have just failed to be enthralled by my recent reading material. I started reading The Archivist by Martha Cooley some weeks ago and was slightly put off by way in which the author decided it was a good idea to fuse past and present. I get the point of doing so--we are all haunted by our pasts. But it felt tedious to read. Then I picked up Alice Munro's The Runaway and Beth Lisick's This Too Can Be Yours. I enjoy Alice Munro's old fashioned style and astute sense of both place and humanity. But when I picked up Lisick's book, I couldn't quite take the humor. I really enjoyed her memoirs, but this book of short stories was just too over the top for me at the time I picked it up. I can certainly appreciate her use of humor, but it is so out of sync with my own imagination that it is difficult to accept at certain times. But I finished her collection of brief stories and decided I needed to go to the bookstore. Actually, before my trip to the bookstore, I started reading Queen of the Oddballs, a typical memoir written by a woman who grew up in the 70s and found her childhood experience unique enough to write it up and market it to women who like to read about what other women did while growing up female. It was amusing, but I still thought it was necessary to buy some new books that I chose myself rather than picked up for free at work. I came home with Weight by Jeanette Winterson, which is slightly less glorious than I had hoped, and The Lipshitz Six, by T Cooper, because I went to a book reading for this novel a few weeks ago and thought it might be worth reading.