Wednesday Reading Meme
May. 15th, 2024 05:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Daphne Du Maurier’s The Birds and Other Stories, a collection of more or less gothic short stories, ending with a story about a dysfunctional family who live by the lake and turn out in the last sentence to be a family of swans. Like, literal swans. Is this cheating? I can’t decide. Certainly it changes how one views the narrator’s decision not to tell the police that the father probably killed the son, since the police would quite rightly point out that they are not here to police the homicidal tendencies of swans.
Also Colette’s Claudine at School, translated by Antonia White. I originally meant to read all four of the Claudine novels, but after barely limping past the finish line of this first one, I decided that life was too short. Claudine is just so mean! She doesn’t have any friends, doesn’t like anyone, sees the ulterior motive in every action that anyone undertakes, and mercilessly bullied a girl who has a crush on her because the girl’s older sister (one of the assistant teachers) threw Claudine over to get with the headmistress. This book was a sensation in fin de siecle Paris and I don’t understand why.
What I’m Reading Now
Sarah Vowell’s Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World, a collection of essays. I've long meant to go back and read some of Vowell’s earlier work, and these essays are a delightful peek at that long-vanished world of the 1990s. An essay about the art of the mix tape! What a blast from the past.
The essays have a more controlled and serious tone than some of Vowell’s longer history books, which I love but feel were sometimes marred by Vowell’s pop culture digressions or current-day political screeds.
It looks like Vowell hasn’t published any books since 2015. I wonder what she’s been up to?
What I Plan to Read Next
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, butlittlerhymes and I are planning to meet up in Paris in mid-June. We thought it would be fun to read a book together in person, but we are not quite sure what to read, so I thought I’d ask for suggestions.
We’re looking for something France or Paris themed; a translation from French would be fun, but we’d also be happy with an English language book set in Paris. Most of our buddy reads are children’s books, and we’re looking for something on the shorter side, since we’ll only be in Paris a week and we want plenty of time to sightsee.
I’ve already vetoed The Little Prince because I’ve read it in two languages and didn’t enjoy it in either.
Daphne Du Maurier’s The Birds and Other Stories, a collection of more or less gothic short stories, ending with a story about a dysfunctional family who live by the lake and turn out in the last sentence to be a family of swans. Like, literal swans. Is this cheating? I can’t decide. Certainly it changes how one views the narrator’s decision not to tell the police that the father probably killed the son, since the police would quite rightly point out that they are not here to police the homicidal tendencies of swans.
Also Colette’s Claudine at School, translated by Antonia White. I originally meant to read all four of the Claudine novels, but after barely limping past the finish line of this first one, I decided that life was too short. Claudine is just so mean! She doesn’t have any friends, doesn’t like anyone, sees the ulterior motive in every action that anyone undertakes, and mercilessly bullied a girl who has a crush on her because the girl’s older sister (one of the assistant teachers) threw Claudine over to get with the headmistress. This book was a sensation in fin de siecle Paris and I don’t understand why.
What I’m Reading Now
Sarah Vowell’s Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World, a collection of essays. I've long meant to go back and read some of Vowell’s earlier work, and these essays are a delightful peek at that long-vanished world of the 1990s. An essay about the art of the mix tape! What a blast from the past.
The essays have a more controlled and serious tone than some of Vowell’s longer history books, which I love but feel were sometimes marred by Vowell’s pop culture digressions or current-day political screeds.
It looks like Vowell hasn’t published any books since 2015. I wonder what she’s been up to?
What I Plan to Read Next
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but
littlerhymes and I are planning to meet up in Paris in mid-June. We thought it would be fun to read a book together in person, but we are not quite sure what to read, so I thought I’d ask for suggestions.We’re looking for something France or Paris themed; a translation from French would be fun, but we’d also be happy with an English language book set in Paris. Most of our buddy reads are children’s books, and we’re looking for something on the shorter side, since we’ll only be in Paris a week and we want plenty of time to sightsee.
I’ve already vetoed The Little Prince because I’ve read it in two languages and didn’t enjoy it in either.
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Date: 2024-05-16 02:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-05-16 07:13 pm (UTC)