Wednesday Reading Meme
Dec. 18th, 2024 07:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat 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?
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?
no subject
Date: 2024-12-18 08:23 pm (UTC)