Wednesday Reading Meme
Oct. 1st, 2025 07:57 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 Heather and Broom, which is accidentally a reread, because I bafflingly forgot to record it the first time I read it. I suspected this from the first story and was sure after the second, which is about a woman who bakes marvelous cakes who gets kidnapped by the fairies. Bake us a cake, they said! But of course, the woman said craftily. I’ll just need my big mixing bowl… and my spoon… and all my ingredients… and I can’t stir at the right rate without the thump of my dog’s tail to guide me, and can’t focus without my baby here so I can see he’s all right (the baby begins to cry incessantly), and ooooh did you remember to get me an oven??
At which point the exhausted fairies send her home, and the baker (as kind-hearted as she is clever) promises to leave them a cake once a week on the mound.
So you can see why I decided to keep on and reread all the stories over again. That one’s my favorite, but they’re all a good time.
I also finished Jostein Gaarder’s The Solitaire Mystery (translated by Sarah Jane Hails), which I’ve been meaning to read for years, and… maybe I should have read it years ago, when I read Sophie’s World and The Christmas Mystery. Reading it now, I found the philosophizing repetitive (isn’t it amazing that the world exists at all! Well, maybe it was the first ten times you said it), and although the way the whole story fits together has a charming puzzle-box neatness, at the same time I really felt that everyone would have been better off if the German soldier ignored the prophecy. Don’t settle down in the tiny Swiss hamlet to wait fifty-two years to meet your grandson! Write to your Norwegian girlfriend (currently an outcast in her hometown because she’s pregnant by a German soldier) and say, “I still love you! Will you marry me? I now own a bakery in a tiny Swiss hamlet, so I can support our family!”
I realize that if he did this there would be no book, since he wouldn’t have needed to write the story of the Solitaire Mystery, photocopy it smaller and smaller until it became an extremely tiny book, bake it into a sticky bun, and then give it to his grandson who is passing through town and doesn’t realize that the baker is his grandfather. Fun for the grandson to put together the pieces of the puzzle I guess, but preposterous for everyone else.
What I’m Reading Now
I’ve started A Cavalcade of Sea Legends, because I was under the impression that it was a story collection by Sorche Nic Leodhas, but in fact it is an anthology that showed up in my Sorche Nic Leodhas search because it has one (1) story by her. Reading it anyway because who doesn’t like a good sea legend! Started off with a bang with a story about a girl who gives up her soul to become a mermaid to join her drowned lover… only in giving up her soul, she brought him back to life, and now he lives on land and she in the sea and ne’er the twain shall meet.
What I Plan to Read Next
After the two aforementioned failed attempts, I will at last achieve my Sorche Nic Leodhas book with Sea-Spell and Moor-Magic.
Sorche Nic Leodhas’s Heather and Broom, which is accidentally a reread, because I bafflingly forgot to record it the first time I read it. I suspected this from the first story and was sure after the second, which is about a woman who bakes marvelous cakes who gets kidnapped by the fairies. Bake us a cake, they said! But of course, the woman said craftily. I’ll just need my big mixing bowl… and my spoon… and all my ingredients… and I can’t stir at the right rate without the thump of my dog’s tail to guide me, and can’t focus without my baby here so I can see he’s all right (the baby begins to cry incessantly), and ooooh did you remember to get me an oven??
At which point the exhausted fairies send her home, and the baker (as kind-hearted as she is clever) promises to leave them a cake once a week on the mound.
So you can see why I decided to keep on and reread all the stories over again. That one’s my favorite, but they’re all a good time.
I also finished Jostein Gaarder’s The Solitaire Mystery (translated by Sarah Jane Hails), which I’ve been meaning to read for years, and… maybe I should have read it years ago, when I read Sophie’s World and The Christmas Mystery. Reading it now, I found the philosophizing repetitive (isn’t it amazing that the world exists at all! Well, maybe it was the first ten times you said it), and although the way the whole story fits together has a charming puzzle-box neatness, at the same time I really felt that everyone would have been better off if the German soldier ignored the prophecy. Don’t settle down in the tiny Swiss hamlet to wait fifty-two years to meet your grandson! Write to your Norwegian girlfriend (currently an outcast in her hometown because she’s pregnant by a German soldier) and say, “I still love you! Will you marry me? I now own a bakery in a tiny Swiss hamlet, so I can support our family!”
I realize that if he did this there would be no book, since he wouldn’t have needed to write the story of the Solitaire Mystery, photocopy it smaller and smaller until it became an extremely tiny book, bake it into a sticky bun, and then give it to his grandson who is passing through town and doesn’t realize that the baker is his grandfather. Fun for the grandson to put together the pieces of the puzzle I guess, but preposterous for everyone else.
What I’m Reading Now
I’ve started A Cavalcade of Sea Legends, because I was under the impression that it was a story collection by Sorche Nic Leodhas, but in fact it is an anthology that showed up in my Sorche Nic Leodhas search because it has one (1) story by her. Reading it anyway because who doesn’t like a good sea legend! Started off with a bang with a story about a girl who gives up her soul to become a mermaid to join her drowned lover… only in giving up her soul, she brought him back to life, and now he lives on land and she in the sea and ne’er the twain shall meet.
What I Plan to Read Next
After the two aforementioned failed attempts, I will at last achieve my Sorche Nic Leodhas book with Sea-Spell and Moor-Magic.
no subject
Date: 2025-10-01 12:55 pm (UTC)Omg this story sounds adorable.
no subject
Date: 2025-10-02 12:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-01 06:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-02 12:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-02 12:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-01 10:32 pm (UTC)That just gave me elementary school flashbacks. I shall have to track down this collection.
no subject
Date: 2025-10-02 12:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-04 03:01 am (UTC)The Solitaire Mystery, on the other hand, might be fun in the right mood but sounds like the kind of puzzlebox that had such fun arranging its little puzzle pieces it forgot to make anyone act like human beings do along the way. Which is a proud tradition of puzzlebox stories, I guess, but not one I tend to have a lot of patience for.
no subject
Date: 2025-10-06 04:55 pm (UTC)Yes, IMO The Solitaire Mystery shows a real failure mode of the puzzlebox story: the author spent so much time meticulously fitting the pieces together, but he never stepped back and looked at the whole picture it made.