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Wednesday Reading Meme
Mar. 12th, 2014 08:26 amMan, it is not very pretty out there this morning. I hope it looks a little less ominous by the time I need to head to work.
What I've Just Finished Reading
The Fall of the House of Walworth, the tawdry tale of a Victorian parricide. After their divorce, the sensation novelist Mansfield Walworth sent his wife a deluge of threatening notes that could have been ripped from his own overwritten novels, culminating in a threat not only to kill his ex-wife but also their children together, in order to cut off the Walworth line FOREVERMORE. Frantic at this deluge, young Frank Walworth went to New York with a loaded gun and shot his father to death in a hotel room.
This is an excellent book. I kept meaning to put it down and do things like "make lunch," but somehow I couldn't stop reading. It's not even that it's so suspenseful. There's no mystery about who committed the murder, as Frank confessed of his own free will right after - seriously, he walked to the police station and was like, "I just killed my father."
It seemed pretty clear to me that it was premeditated. I suspect the jury found for murder in the second degree not because they actually thought Frank acted on impulse, but because in their heart of hearts they felt that Frank had performed a public service by killing his abusive, narcissistic father.
Gregory Orr's Poetry as Survival, which is about poetry as a method for organizing the uncertainty and chaos of life and channeling trauma. It's interesting, but I think he's universalizing too much from his own experience: clearly for him poetry is a central coping mechanism, but it does not therefore follow that this is an intrinsic part of the human experience, even if we include song lyrics (as he does, though only very briefly) in the definition of poetry.
And finally, Charles Finch's The Last Enchantments, which has convinced me to stick with Finch's Charles Lenox mysteries from now on and leave his experiments in contemporary fiction alone. The book is well-written, but it's not my kind of book. Our narrator, Will Baker, spends a great deal of time haplessly cheating on different girls successively, even Sophie, the girl he loves obsessively for most of the story. Meanwhile! Meanwhile! He asks his not-quite-ex-girlfriend Alison (they're taking a break, but not exactly totally broken up) not to hook up with anyone else.
Alison says she doesn't, but I cannot be the only one hoping that she is lying through her teeth and secretly spent the winter attending orgies.
This makes it sound like I hate the book far more than I do. In between the cheating bits it's thoughtful, meditative, a good evocation of college friendships (technically they're all in graduate school, but it feels like undergrad; maybe graduate school is chummier in Oxford). Will has a deceptively thoughtful, decent, even compassionate voice; and then he cheats on someone again, and it's like, what is this? He clearly knows better than this.
What I'm Reading Now
Ivanhoe. Poor Ivanhoe doesn't get to do much protagging in his own book; right now he's laid up in the castle of his enemies, watched over by the faithful Rebecca and gnashing his teeth because he is forced by his injuries to stay in bed and wait to be rescued by Robin Hood and the black knight who I am almost certain is King Richard in disguise.
I'm also reading Holly Black's Doll Bones, which was one of the contenders for the Newbery medal this year. While it isn't blowing me away like last year's winner, The One and Only Ivan (which I highly recommend: it's told in the point of view of a gorilla in a mall exhibit, and it's just exactly the perfect mixture of sadness and hope), Doll Bones does get
And finally The Beautiful Cigar Girl, which is about Mary Rogers, a cigar salesgirl in 1830s New York (which female store clerks were still new and rather scandalous) who was murdered, and the thinly fictionalized version of her murder that Edgar Allan Poe wrote. It reminds me a bit of The Devil and the White City: both books probably sell because of the murders, but really the chapters about other things (the 1893 World's Fair in The Devil and the White City, Edgar Allan Poe in The Beautiful Cigar Girl) are more interesting.
I don't know how much new this would tell a Poe afficionado, but as someone who knows only the bare outlines of Poe's life I find it quite fascinating.
What I Plan to Read Next
Rosemary Sutcliff's Rider on a White Horse, and perhaps Rumer Godden's Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy.
What I've Just Finished Reading
The Fall of the House of Walworth, the tawdry tale of a Victorian parricide. After their divorce, the sensation novelist Mansfield Walworth sent his wife a deluge of threatening notes that could have been ripped from his own overwritten novels, culminating in a threat not only to kill his ex-wife but also their children together, in order to cut off the Walworth line FOREVERMORE. Frantic at this deluge, young Frank Walworth went to New York with a loaded gun and shot his father to death in a hotel room.
This is an excellent book. I kept meaning to put it down and do things like "make lunch," but somehow I couldn't stop reading. It's not even that it's so suspenseful. There's no mystery about who committed the murder, as Frank confessed of his own free will right after - seriously, he walked to the police station and was like, "I just killed my father."
It seemed pretty clear to me that it was premeditated. I suspect the jury found for murder in the second degree not because they actually thought Frank acted on impulse, but because in their heart of hearts they felt that Frank had performed a public service by killing his abusive, narcissistic father.
Gregory Orr's Poetry as Survival, which is about poetry as a method for organizing the uncertainty and chaos of life and channeling trauma. It's interesting, but I think he's universalizing too much from his own experience: clearly for him poetry is a central coping mechanism, but it does not therefore follow that this is an intrinsic part of the human experience, even if we include song lyrics (as he does, though only very briefly) in the definition of poetry.
And finally, Charles Finch's The Last Enchantments, which has convinced me to stick with Finch's Charles Lenox mysteries from now on and leave his experiments in contemporary fiction alone. The book is well-written, but it's not my kind of book. Our narrator, Will Baker, spends a great deal of time haplessly cheating on different girls successively, even Sophie, the girl he loves obsessively for most of the story. Meanwhile! Meanwhile! He asks his not-quite-ex-girlfriend Alison (they're taking a break, but not exactly totally broken up) not to hook up with anyone else.
Alison says she doesn't, but I cannot be the only one hoping that she is lying through her teeth and secretly spent the winter attending orgies.
This makes it sound like I hate the book far more than I do. In between the cheating bits it's thoughtful, meditative, a good evocation of college friendships (technically they're all in graduate school, but it feels like undergrad; maybe graduate school is chummier in Oxford). Will has a deceptively thoughtful, decent, even compassionate voice; and then he cheats on someone again, and it's like, what is this? He clearly knows better than this.
What I'm Reading Now
Ivanhoe. Poor Ivanhoe doesn't get to do much protagging in his own book; right now he's laid up in the castle of his enemies, watched over by the faithful Rebecca and gnashing his teeth because he is forced by his injuries to stay in bed and wait to be rescued by Robin Hood and the black knight who I am almost certain is King Richard in disguise.
I'm also reading Holly Black's Doll Bones, which was one of the contenders for the Newbery medal this year. While it isn't blowing me away like last year's winner, The One and Only Ivan (which I highly recommend: it's told in the point of view of a gorilla in a mall exhibit, and it's just exactly the perfect mixture of sadness and hope), Doll Bones does get
And finally The Beautiful Cigar Girl, which is about Mary Rogers, a cigar salesgirl in 1830s New York (which female store clerks were still new and rather scandalous) who was murdered, and the thinly fictionalized version of her murder that Edgar Allan Poe wrote. It reminds me a bit of The Devil and the White City: both books probably sell because of the murders, but really the chapters about other things (the 1893 World's Fair in The Devil and the White City, Edgar Allan Poe in The Beautiful Cigar Girl) are more interesting.
I don't know how much new this would tell a Poe afficionado, but as someone who knows only the bare outlines of Poe's life I find it quite fascinating.
What I Plan to Read Next
Rosemary Sutcliff's Rider on a White Horse, and perhaps Rumer Godden's Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy.
