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Wednesday Reading Meme
Aug. 27th, 2014 07:49 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
The Gadfly, by Ethel Lilian Voynich, and THIS BOOK, you guys. I have many feelings! Not least of which is that I can’t decide if I want to hug Arthur or strangle him, because he has the saddest life EVER, but at the same time everyone else is miserable too, and he has it in his power to make them happier, and he won’t.
( Spoilers, of course. )
This book is soaked, soaked with emotion. It’s kind of awesome in that way. And it makes sense, psychologically, that no one ever sits down to discuss the things that are uppermost in their mind, because Arthur in particular is very thoroughly broken. Even he knows he would be happier if he forgave Gemma and Montanelli and let them each cuddle him for a month (which they are both clearly dying to do). But he can’t. IT’S SO BEAUTIFULLY PAINFUL.
I also read William Dean Howell’s A Hazard of New Fortunes, which makes an entertaining contrast, because it contains a far less flattering portrait of an idealistic young man with an entire lack of self-knowledge. Witness, for instance, Beaton’s musings after he is forced to ask his elderly father for more money yet again:
He pitied his poor old father; he ached with compassion for him; and he set his teeth and snarled with contempt through them for his own baseness. This was the kind of world it was; but he washed his hands of it. The fault was in human nature, and he reflected with pride that he had at least not invented human nature; he had not sunk so low as that yet.
Look at the way Beaton twists even his self-contempt into yet more food for his own conceit! It’s a tiny masterpiece.
It would also get old swiftly at book-length, but fortunately Beaton only headlines one of A Hazard of New Fortunes many plot threads, and no one else is quite so self-deceiving. It’s a rather hard book to describe, actually, because there are so many characters, and while they’re all connected by the new literary magazine that they’re spearheading, they all have their own plot threads that are often quite separate. But it’s a sort of exploration of New York in the late nineteenth century, a musing on the problem of labor and capital; it explores and muses but comes to no conclusions, so while it is interesting it also ultimately feels rather slight.
What I’m Reading Now
Sara Jeannette Duncan’s The Imperialist, which is evidently the most famous of her novels. I want to like this, because she was a somewhat important Canadian woman writer around 1900, and she wrote travelogues about, for instance, her trip around the globe with her best friend (two women traveling around the world on their own in the 1890s! Why does Kindle not have this).
And yet this is not grabbing me. I find Duncan’s sentence structure strangely hard to follow; I can’t pinpoint just why, though. Normally I find late nineteenth century punctuation easy enough (just look how many semi-colons William Dean Howells snuck into that paragraph above! A man after my own heart), but somehow, somehow not this time. .
What I Plan to Read Next
Not sure yet. I have the airplane ride home tomorrow, so I might read a lot…or I might be seduced by the lure of free movies. Or possibly Dad and I will end up discussing My Future, as the trip is coming to an end and My Future will swiftly become My Present.
The Gadfly, by Ethel Lilian Voynich, and THIS BOOK, you guys. I have many feelings! Not least of which is that I can’t decide if I want to hug Arthur or strangle him, because he has the saddest life EVER, but at the same time everyone else is miserable too, and he has it in his power to make them happier, and he won’t.
( Spoilers, of course. )
This book is soaked, soaked with emotion. It’s kind of awesome in that way. And it makes sense, psychologically, that no one ever sits down to discuss the things that are uppermost in their mind, because Arthur in particular is very thoroughly broken. Even he knows he would be happier if he forgave Gemma and Montanelli and let them each cuddle him for a month (which they are both clearly dying to do). But he can’t. IT’S SO BEAUTIFULLY PAINFUL.
I also read William Dean Howell’s A Hazard of New Fortunes, which makes an entertaining contrast, because it contains a far less flattering portrait of an idealistic young man with an entire lack of self-knowledge. Witness, for instance, Beaton’s musings after he is forced to ask his elderly father for more money yet again:
He pitied his poor old father; he ached with compassion for him; and he set his teeth and snarled with contempt through them for his own baseness. This was the kind of world it was; but he washed his hands of it. The fault was in human nature, and he reflected with pride that he had at least not invented human nature; he had not sunk so low as that yet.
Look at the way Beaton twists even his self-contempt into yet more food for his own conceit! It’s a tiny masterpiece.
It would also get old swiftly at book-length, but fortunately Beaton only headlines one of A Hazard of New Fortunes many plot threads, and no one else is quite so self-deceiving. It’s a rather hard book to describe, actually, because there are so many characters, and while they’re all connected by the new literary magazine that they’re spearheading, they all have their own plot threads that are often quite separate. But it’s a sort of exploration of New York in the late nineteenth century, a musing on the problem of labor and capital; it explores and muses but comes to no conclusions, so while it is interesting it also ultimately feels rather slight.
What I’m Reading Now
Sara Jeannette Duncan’s The Imperialist, which is evidently the most famous of her novels. I want to like this, because she was a somewhat important Canadian woman writer around 1900, and she wrote travelogues about, for instance, her trip around the globe with her best friend (two women traveling around the world on their own in the 1890s! Why does Kindle not have this).
And yet this is not grabbing me. I find Duncan’s sentence structure strangely hard to follow; I can’t pinpoint just why, though. Normally I find late nineteenth century punctuation easy enough (just look how many semi-colons William Dean Howells snuck into that paragraph above! A man after my own heart), but somehow, somehow not this time. .
What I Plan to Read Next
Not sure yet. I have the airplane ride home tomorrow, so I might read a lot…or I might be seduced by the lure of free movies. Or possibly Dad and I will end up discussing My Future, as the trip is coming to an end and My Future will swiftly become My Present.
