Wednesday Reading Meme
Jan. 14th, 2026 08:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Elizabeth Enright’s Then There Were Five. That’s right, the Melendys are back! This time, they befriend a local boy with no friends or relations except his horrible uncle, and the Melendy children take him home and ask “Can we keep him???” They gather scrap metal for the war effort, plan a festival (children in books always throw the most satisfying festivals), and put up a truly astonishing amount of tomatoes.
What I’m Reading Now
Onward and upward in Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle! The blurb on the front of this novel praises it as “suspenseful,” which is fascinating because that’s probably the last adjective I’d use to describe it. Absorbing, yes. Full of meticulous portraits of a dizzying array of people, yes. We meet a deeply religious prisoner, a soft-hearted prison guard, Stalin, a prisoner who still believes fanatically in Communism, a prisoner’s wife whose devotion to her husband is cracking under the strain of separation, her friend in their grad student dorm who is trying to wriggle free of being recruited as an informer…
But suspenseful? I wouldn’t call it suspenseful. We’re halfway through the book and we’ve just now meandered back to Volodin, the guy who telephoned the American embassy on Christmas Eve to warn them that the Soviets are planning to steal their atomic bomb secrets. We are not urgently searching for Volodin (well, maybe the fanatically Communist prisoner Rubin is urgently searching for Volodin), we are gently bobbing around in a pool and occasionally bobbing a bit extra hard when we come across one of the ripples caused when Volodin tossed his pebble.
What I Plan to Read Next
National Velvet!
Elizabeth Enright’s Then There Were Five. That’s right, the Melendys are back! This time, they befriend a local boy with no friends or relations except his horrible uncle, and the Melendy children take him home and ask “Can we keep him???” They gather scrap metal for the war effort, plan a festival (children in books always throw the most satisfying festivals), and put up a truly astonishing amount of tomatoes.
What I’m Reading Now
Onward and upward in Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle! The blurb on the front of this novel praises it as “suspenseful,” which is fascinating because that’s probably the last adjective I’d use to describe it. Absorbing, yes. Full of meticulous portraits of a dizzying array of people, yes. We meet a deeply religious prisoner, a soft-hearted prison guard, Stalin, a prisoner who still believes fanatically in Communism, a prisoner’s wife whose devotion to her husband is cracking under the strain of separation, her friend in their grad student dorm who is trying to wriggle free of being recruited as an informer…
But suspenseful? I wouldn’t call it suspenseful. We’re halfway through the book and we’ve just now meandered back to Volodin, the guy who telephoned the American embassy on Christmas Eve to warn them that the Soviets are planning to steal their atomic bomb secrets. We are not urgently searching for Volodin (well, maybe the fanatically Communist prisoner Rubin is urgently searching for Volodin), we are gently bobbing around in a pool and occasionally bobbing a bit extra hard when we come across one of the ripples caused when Volodin tossed his pebble.
What I Plan to Read Next
National Velvet!
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Date: 2026-01-14 05:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-14 06:34 pm (UTC)