Wednesday Reading Meme
Sep. 10th, 2025 07:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
We are undergoing some upheaval at work, and as always in times of upheaval, I’ve turned to the soothing verities of mystery novels. In this case, I read Rex Stout’s The Doorbell Rang, my first Nero Wolfe novel, which features MANY delicious meals, Nero Wolfe taking on J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, and a certain amount of Wolfe’s assistant Archie ogling women, the last of which means that I shouldn’t read too many of these books in a row or else I’ll get too irritated to continue. But I do mean to circle back to Rex Stout from time to time!
I also finished Elizabeth Gaskell’s Gothic Tales, which wrapped up with “The Grey Lady,” in which a woman escapes from her evil husband (a secret highwayman!) with the aid of her lady’s maid Amante, who disguises herself as a man and passes herself off as our narrator’s husband.
What I’m Reading Now
Continuing my meander through Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. Reading all those Newbery books from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s has really helped me appreciate this book more, because their repeated paeans to Progress (and cowardly, skulking wolves who need to be shot) makes it clear just how hard Leopold was swimming against the tide when he notes that Progress has drawbacks, such as the fact that if you shoot all the wolves, the unchecked deer population will eat the mountainside down to easily eroded dirt.
Also, a quote that struck me: “We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness.”
What I Plan to Read Next
Genzaburo Yoshino’s How Do You Live? The label at Von’s said this book was one of Miyazaki’s favorites as a boy, and how was I to resist that?
We are undergoing some upheaval at work, and as always in times of upheaval, I’ve turned to the soothing verities of mystery novels. In this case, I read Rex Stout’s The Doorbell Rang, my first Nero Wolfe novel, which features MANY delicious meals, Nero Wolfe taking on J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, and a certain amount of Wolfe’s assistant Archie ogling women, the last of which means that I shouldn’t read too many of these books in a row or else I’ll get too irritated to continue. But I do mean to circle back to Rex Stout from time to time!
I also finished Elizabeth Gaskell’s Gothic Tales, which wrapped up with “The Grey Lady,” in which a woman escapes from her evil husband (a secret highwayman!) with the aid of her lady’s maid Amante, who disguises herself as a man and passes herself off as our narrator’s husband.
What I’m Reading Now
Continuing my meander through Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. Reading all those Newbery books from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s has really helped me appreciate this book more, because their repeated paeans to Progress (and cowardly, skulking wolves who need to be shot) makes it clear just how hard Leopold was swimming against the tide when he notes that Progress has drawbacks, such as the fact that if you shoot all the wolves, the unchecked deer population will eat the mountainside down to easily eroded dirt.
Also, a quote that struck me: “We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness.”
What I Plan to Read Next
Genzaburo Yoshino’s How Do You Live? The label at Von’s said this book was one of Miyazaki’s favorites as a boy, and how was I to resist that?
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Date: 2025-09-10 08:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-11 06:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-11 05:16 am (UTC)I hope they lived adventurously ever after.
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Date: 2025-09-11 06:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-12 04:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-12 04:40 am (UTC)I really ought to reread A Sand Country Almanac. It's so lovely, but I don't think I fully appreciate the extent to which he was swimming against the tide on that either.
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Date: 2025-09-12 06:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-13 02:52 pm (UTC)Truly! :sighs in "had to get deliberately arrested last weekend to fight for free speech and a free Palestine":
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Date: 2025-09-15 05:21 pm (UTC)