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Wednesday Reading Meme
Feb. 19th, 2014 09:03 amWhat I’ve Finished Reading
Louisa May Alcott’s Little Men, which is reasonably entertaining but not one of her best. (Rose in Bloom will now and forever be my favorite Alcott book.) But it did do a good job showing Jo and Professor Bhaer as a well-suited match: I just can’t see Laurie running a school with Jo, or indeed living a life active and varied enough to suit her.
Also William Dean Howells’ The Rise of Silas Lapham. Howells is unusual among nineteenth century American writers in that he writes comedies of manners, like a male gaze-y version of Austen (which I suppose would make him an American Trollope…) I find his books mildly entertaining on the literary front, but fascinating for their vision of nineteenth-century American life among the settled middle classes: he’s like a grown-up and less blatantly moralizing version of Alcott.
What I’m Reading Now
Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. I’ve wanted to read this since reading The Paris Wife, but put it off because another book - sadly, I can’t remember which - said that A Moveable Feast was vicious and score-settling, particularly with regard to Gertrude Stein.
So far, however, Hemingway’s tone toward Stein is if anything bemused. She was clearly a complicated and sometimes exasperating person, who did not so much talk as pontificate, even when she was talking about things she didn’t actually understand. It would be easy to write a vicious caricature, and instead Hemingway writes about her with affectionate amusement. It seems like he still doesn’t know quite what to make of her, forty years later.
(On the other hand, he also describes someone - I forget just who, but he does tell us the name - as having the eyes of a “failed rapist.” I can only assume the man was dead by the time the book was published, because talk about character assassination!)
I’m also reading Judith Flanders’ Circle of Sisters: Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne-Jones, Agnes Poynter, and Louisa Baldwin, which is about the four MacDonald sisters and their illustrious marriages. I really enjoyed Flanders’ later book, Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England, but this is clearly more of a journeyman effort. It’s not precisely boring, but the prose (and the people) don’t come to life like they do in Inside the Victorian Home. I keep getting Agnes and Louisa (and their respective husbands) mixed up. They have no distinguishing features.
Also continuing in The Misinterpretation of Tara Jupp. Tara has just met the boy she had a huge crush on when she was ten, only to discover that he doesn’t remember her and that he’s gotten kind of full of himself. WOE.
What I Plan to Read Next
Probably Garth Nix’s A Confusion of Princes. For years he never published anything I found interesting, and now he’s gone and put out not only A Confusion of Princes (space opera), Newt’s Emerald (magical mystery Regency romance), and Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz: Three Adventures (magical adventures, aimed at adults).
Oh, and! Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Witch’s Brat.
Louisa May Alcott’s Little Men, which is reasonably entertaining but not one of her best. (Rose in Bloom will now and forever be my favorite Alcott book.) But it did do a good job showing Jo and Professor Bhaer as a well-suited match: I just can’t see Laurie running a school with Jo, or indeed living a life active and varied enough to suit her.
Also William Dean Howells’ The Rise of Silas Lapham. Howells is unusual among nineteenth century American writers in that he writes comedies of manners, like a male gaze-y version of Austen (which I suppose would make him an American Trollope…) I find his books mildly entertaining on the literary front, but fascinating for their vision of nineteenth-century American life among the settled middle classes: he’s like a grown-up and less blatantly moralizing version of Alcott.
What I’m Reading Now
Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. I’ve wanted to read this since reading The Paris Wife, but put it off because another book - sadly, I can’t remember which - said that A Moveable Feast was vicious and score-settling, particularly with regard to Gertrude Stein.
So far, however, Hemingway’s tone toward Stein is if anything bemused. She was clearly a complicated and sometimes exasperating person, who did not so much talk as pontificate, even when she was talking about things she didn’t actually understand. It would be easy to write a vicious caricature, and instead Hemingway writes about her with affectionate amusement. It seems like he still doesn’t know quite what to make of her, forty years later.
(On the other hand, he also describes someone - I forget just who, but he does tell us the name - as having the eyes of a “failed rapist.” I can only assume the man was dead by the time the book was published, because talk about character assassination!)
I’m also reading Judith Flanders’ Circle of Sisters: Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne-Jones, Agnes Poynter, and Louisa Baldwin, which is about the four MacDonald sisters and their illustrious marriages. I really enjoyed Flanders’ later book, Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England, but this is clearly more of a journeyman effort. It’s not precisely boring, but the prose (and the people) don’t come to life like they do in Inside the Victorian Home. I keep getting Agnes and Louisa (and their respective husbands) mixed up. They have no distinguishing features.
Also continuing in The Misinterpretation of Tara Jupp. Tara has just met the boy she had a huge crush on when she was ten, only to discover that he doesn’t remember her and that he’s gotten kind of full of himself. WOE.
What I Plan to Read Next
Probably Garth Nix’s A Confusion of Princes. For years he never published anything I found interesting, and now he’s gone and put out not only A Confusion of Princes (space opera), Newt’s Emerald (magical mystery Regency romance), and Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz: Three Adventures (magical adventures, aimed at adults).
Oh, and! Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Witch’s Brat.
