Wednesday Reading Meme
Mar. 26th, 2025 07:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Arnold Bennett’s How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day, an early (1908) example of the “how to productively use your time” manual, and charmingly modest in its goals. Bennet takes it as a given that you don’t want to be more productive at the office: your office is boring! He knows it, you know it! And that’s part of why you want to develop your intellectual life in your time off, for which purpose Bennett suggests devoting one and a half hours three evenings a week to a course of reading you find interesting. Music theory, philosophy, the history of street cries, follow your heart.
The edition on Gutenberg also includes a preface in which Bennett addresses the weirdo who does put his all into his office work, but nonetheless wants to develop his mind even though he’s worn out by the evening. Get up early in the morning, before the servants, make yourself a cup of tea, and do your reading then.
What I’m Reading Now
Annie Fellows Johnston’s Cicely and Other Stories, a short story collection. I just finished “Alida’s Homeliness,” in which a homely girl is saved from a life of sulky self-consciousness… by taking up the study of medicine! She apprentices herself to Doctor Agnes Mayne, the local woman doctor, saves a child’s life, and incidentally wins the heart of the child’s doting young uncle.
What I Plan to Read Next
The recent IMLS cuts have put the fear of God into me re: my ability to get the rest of the 1930s Newbery books via ILL, so I intend to read the last twelve as swiftly as is compatible with actually getting the meat out of the books.
Arnold Bennett’s How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day, an early (1908) example of the “how to productively use your time” manual, and charmingly modest in its goals. Bennet takes it as a given that you don’t want to be more productive at the office: your office is boring! He knows it, you know it! And that’s part of why you want to develop your intellectual life in your time off, for which purpose Bennett suggests devoting one and a half hours three evenings a week to a course of reading you find interesting. Music theory, philosophy, the history of street cries, follow your heart.
The edition on Gutenberg also includes a preface in which Bennett addresses the weirdo who does put his all into his office work, but nonetheless wants to develop his mind even though he’s worn out by the evening. Get up early in the morning, before the servants, make yourself a cup of tea, and do your reading then.
What I’m Reading Now
Annie Fellows Johnston’s Cicely and Other Stories, a short story collection. I just finished “Alida’s Homeliness,” in which a homely girl is saved from a life of sulky self-consciousness… by taking up the study of medicine! She apprentices herself to Doctor Agnes Mayne, the local woman doctor, saves a child’s life, and incidentally wins the heart of the child’s doting young uncle.
What I Plan to Read Next
The recent IMLS cuts have put the fear of God into me re: my ability to get the rest of the 1930s Newbery books via ILL, so I intend to read the last twelve as swiftly as is compatible with actually getting the meat out of the books.
