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Wednesday Reading Meme
Oct. 30th, 2013 08:08 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Oliver Twist. Dickens is an awfully vengeful writer - the good end well and the bad end up dying with an angry mob hooting gleefully around the scaffold. It puts me off him.
What I’m Reading Now
Anton DiSclafani's The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls. At some point, I am going to be able to spell this title without looking it up, but today is not that day.
I'm mostly enjoying it, although it has one of those irritating beginnings where the protagonist is all "Something SUPER DRAMATIC just happened to me, but I'm not going to tell you what it is, because I'm afraid that if I do you won't find the book interesting enough to keep reading." Ugh. Just spill the beans already, don't be so manipulative. Nothing is going to live up to this much build-up anyway.
Also still trucking along in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and the Damned. There are some authors whose work strikes me as irresistibly autobiographical; Charlotte Bronte is one, and F. Scott Fitzgerald's is another. I'm not sure all his heroes are him - although you could make a strong argument for Anthony Patch as his alter ego - but his heroines are always his wife, Zelda.
Hemingway thought Zelda was an emotional vampire who dragged Scott away from his work, but I tend to think Scott wouldn't have written anything much without Zelda as his inspiration. He might have been happier without her, but he doesn't seem to care too much about happiness, or perhaps even to believe real happiness is possible. It's as if he thinks happiness is a sham - that to be happy in the face of modernity is to be an ostrich with one's head in the sand.
Fitzgerald is kind of a drag.
What I Plan to Read Next
Ally Carter’s United We Spy! So excited to finish the Gallagher Girls series!
Oliver Twist. Dickens is an awfully vengeful writer - the good end well and the bad end up dying with an angry mob hooting gleefully around the scaffold. It puts me off him.
What I’m Reading Now
Anton DiSclafani's The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls. At some point, I am going to be able to spell this title without looking it up, but today is not that day.
I'm mostly enjoying it, although it has one of those irritating beginnings where the protagonist is all "Something SUPER DRAMATIC just happened to me, but I'm not going to tell you what it is, because I'm afraid that if I do you won't find the book interesting enough to keep reading." Ugh. Just spill the beans already, don't be so manipulative. Nothing is going to live up to this much build-up anyway.
Also still trucking along in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and the Damned. There are some authors whose work strikes me as irresistibly autobiographical; Charlotte Bronte is one, and F. Scott Fitzgerald's is another. I'm not sure all his heroes are him - although you could make a strong argument for Anthony Patch as his alter ego - but his heroines are always his wife, Zelda.
Hemingway thought Zelda was an emotional vampire who dragged Scott away from his work, but I tend to think Scott wouldn't have written anything much without Zelda as his inspiration. He might have been happier without her, but he doesn't seem to care too much about happiness, or perhaps even to believe real happiness is possible. It's as if he thinks happiness is a sham - that to be happy in the face of modernity is to be an ostrich with one's head in the sand.
Fitzgerald is kind of a drag.
What I Plan to Read Next
Ally Carter’s United We Spy! So excited to finish the Gallagher Girls series!
