Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Gary Paulsen’s Guts: The True Stories Behind Hatchet and the Brian Books, in which Paulsen details the various wilderness experiences that shaped Hatchet. Everything in the book is either something that happened to him (like getting stomped by an angry moose) or something that he tried to make sure it would work - like spending four hours striking flint rocks in a cave wall with a steel hatchet to make sure that you could actually start a fire from the resulting sparks.

The one thing he simply couldn’t do is eat a raw turtle egg. As Paulsen notes, Brian was starving when he managed it, and maybe Paulsen could have done it too if he had been hungry enough, but as a well-fed man training his sled dogs for the Iditarod, no.

I also finished Stella Gibbons’ Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm, a collection of short stories, only two of which are Christmas-related. I was a bit disappointed at first to realize it’s not a Christmas collection, but once I recovered from my pique I enjoyed myself for the most part. The story where a charmingly eccentric woman accidentally destroys the happy life she’s carefully built by trying to do a kind deed will haunt me, though.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Bronte. More specifically, I’ve begun a 1900 reprint of the third edition, where Gaskell removed sundry items, such as the assertion that Patrick Bronte had cut up one of his wife’s silk dresses and sawn the backs off of chairs. (Presumably chair backs are inimical to giving one’s offspring a suitably spartan upbringing?) But I know where they were, because the edition has footnotes by Clement K. Shorter, which mention these charges specifically in order to refute them, thus inadvertently renewing these charges once again.

Ever since this book was published, there has been controversy over whether Gaskell overstated the miseries of the Brontes’ lives, so I was amused to find this letter from Charlotte’s friend Mary Taylor in the introduction. “Though not so gloomy as the truth,” Taylor wrote to Gaskell, “it [that is, the biography] is perhaps as much so as people will accept without calling it exaggerated, and feeling the desire to doubt and contradict it.”

Apparently there is a third position, which is that Gaskell actually understated matters!

What I Plan to Read Next

Does anyone have any recs for nonfiction books about the French Revolution?

Comments

[asakiyume]

“it [that is, the biography] is perhaps as much so as people will accept without calling it exaggerated, and feeling the desire to doubt and contradict it.”

Wow, so that was a thing people talked about back in the day, too: that if you told what something was really like, no one would believe you. ... I guess maybe it's always been with us?

Writing a biography seems like such a challenge! How much of what people tell you are you going to believe? How do you fact-check?

... I think we can let Gary Paulsen off the hook for re: the turtle egg. For one thing, that would have deprived the world of a turtle!

[osprey_archer]

One of the interesting things about studying history is the wild veers between "Wow, humans have always been human, huh?" and "WOW things change a lot sometimes." No one would believe you if you told them how bad it really was apparently falls in the first category.

Alas, Paulsen did TRY to eat the turtle egg, so the world was deprived a turtle regardless!

[asakiyume]

*Hindenburg voice* OH THE TUR-TALITY 😭

[troisoiseaux]

Does anyone have any recs for nonfiction books about the French Revolution?

I haven't gotten around to reading it yet, but I have A New World Begins by Jeremy D. Popkin on my to-read list. I also read The French Revolution by Ian Davidson and it was, like, fine, but he does get points for looking at the effect/events of the French Rev outside of Paris.

[osprey_archer]

Russian Revolution books tend to have the same problem where it's All Petrograd, All the Time. What was happening in the rest of the country? In Moscow even? Bah, who cares!

[ethelmay]

My favorite Brontë story is that the push to get Elizabeth Gaskell to write a biography of Charlotte was in response to an article in Sharpe's London Magazine that Ellen Nussey called "a tissue of malignant falsehoods" -- only, who do you think was responsible for that article? ELIZABETH GASKELL HERSELF. See Juliet Barker, The Brontës (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), p. 780 ff.

[osprey_archer]

Oh dear...

[rachelmanija]

Guts was hilarious. I'd love to hang out with Gary Paulson, so long as I could escape easily.

[osprey_archer]

I feel that in between the It Could Only Happen to Rachel filter and Gary Paulsen's everything, you would inevitably ended up stranded on an island together.

[rachelmanija]

That is why I put in the escape clause.

[ethelmay]

They should get together with Diana Wynne Jones (yes, I am very sad this is not possible) and her travel jinx, just to really mess with things.

[asakiyume]

😂

[passingbuzzards]

The one thing he simply couldn’t do is eat a raw turtle egg. As Paulsen notes, Brian was starving when he managed it, and maybe Paulsen could have done it too if he had been hungry enough, but as a well-fed man training his sled dogs for the Iditarod, no.

Omg! Definitely for the best, one feels, or he might not have survived to write anything about it... :,)

[osprey_archer]

It was a freshly laid raw turtle egg! No time to go bad. But uh I guess raw turtle eggs are simply not very palatable.