Wednesday Reading Meme
Oct. 23rd, 2024 11:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Sorche Nic Leodhas’s Twelve Great Black Cats, and Other Eerie Scottish Tales, a delightfully spooky set of ghost and ghost-adjacent stories. My only criticism is that the title is Twelve Great Black Cats and there are only ten stories and the mismatch offends my sense of the fitness of things.
Also Gerald Durrell’s The Fantastic Flying Journey, in which three children go on a round the world adventure in a hot air balloon! after taking a powder that allows them to speak to animals!!! with their fat and lovably foolish uncle Lancelot who I am almost certain is Durrell’s self-caricature. (He keeps getting himself in dangerous situation - chased by a rhino etc - and then sternly warning the children that they need to be more careful, as they attempt not to giggle.)
Not quite as good as his memoirs, but still fun. It obeys to a T the cardinal rule of children’s fantasy: asking yourself “What would I have liked to read about when I was eleven?” and then writing it.
The 2024 Newbery Honor books continued strong with Pedro Martín’s Mexikid: A Graphic Memoir, a graphic novel about a trip to visit his parents’ hometown in Mexico that the whole family (nine kids!) took sometime in the 1970s. (Young Pedro’s favorite TV show is Happy Days, and he yearns to be as cool as The Fonz.) Lots of fun! I especially loved the sequences about Pedro’s grandfather’s work as a mule driver during the Mexican Revolution, which Pedro envisions in superhero style.
What I’m Reading Now
Not much progress on Shirley this week, as I was traveling over the weekend. Shirley and Caroline have planned aromantic getaway trip to Scotland, and also started a plan for the relief of the poor of the parish who have been thrown out of work by the war and the new cloth-making machines.
What I Plan to Read Next
This Saturday I have a date with John Le Carré’s The Looking Glass War.
Sorche Nic Leodhas’s Twelve Great Black Cats, and Other Eerie Scottish Tales, a delightfully spooky set of ghost and ghost-adjacent stories. My only criticism is that the title is Twelve Great Black Cats and there are only ten stories and the mismatch offends my sense of the fitness of things.
Also Gerald Durrell’s The Fantastic Flying Journey, in which three children go on a round the world adventure in a hot air balloon! after taking a powder that allows them to speak to animals!!! with their fat and lovably foolish uncle Lancelot who I am almost certain is Durrell’s self-caricature. (He keeps getting himself in dangerous situation - chased by a rhino etc - and then sternly warning the children that they need to be more careful, as they attempt not to giggle.)
Not quite as good as his memoirs, but still fun. It obeys to a T the cardinal rule of children’s fantasy: asking yourself “What would I have liked to read about when I was eleven?” and then writing it.
The 2024 Newbery Honor books continued strong with Pedro Martín’s Mexikid: A Graphic Memoir, a graphic novel about a trip to visit his parents’ hometown in Mexico that the whole family (nine kids!) took sometime in the 1970s. (Young Pedro’s favorite TV show is Happy Days, and he yearns to be as cool as The Fonz.) Lots of fun! I especially loved the sequences about Pedro’s grandfather’s work as a mule driver during the Mexican Revolution, which Pedro envisions in superhero style.
What I’m Reading Now
Not much progress on Shirley this week, as I was traveling over the weekend. Shirley and Caroline have planned a
What I Plan to Read Next
This Saturday I have a date with John Le Carré’s The Looking Glass War.
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Date: 2024-10-25 01:35 am (UTC)Ohboy. Yeah, that is the book he supposedly wrote because some people STILL found his spy stuff too heroic in his opinion. I think I've read it once.
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Date: 2024-10-25 06:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-26 07:55 pm (UTC)Looking Glass isn't just insistently nihilistic and verging on squalid, the pacing is also pretty draggy and from what I remember far too much time is spent on an awful marriage a la mode (perhaps foreshadowing the truly dreadful Naïve and Sentimental Lover). It's not just unpleasant, there's a sense of the author determinedly rubbing his audience's nose into the mess.
Supposedly it's based on the historical rivalry between the SOE and the SIS. I think.