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Wednesday Reading Meme
May. 11th, 2016 09:19 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
I already posted a review of Paradise Now, and nothing since then.
What I’m Reading Now
Louisa May Alcott’s Moods, and I have to say, I can totally see why posterity ignores this book in favor of Little Women and Alcott’s other children’s books. Alcott preferred writing about men (she mentions this numerous times, sometimes within her own books for girls), but most of her guy characters are sooooo booooring in comparison to the girls. (I make an exception for Laurie. He’s practically an honorary Marsh sister anyway.) Moods features a lantern-jawed paragon of manly self-reliance whose name I can’t even recall.
I’m also reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, which I am enjoying very much, insofar as one can enjoy a book that makes one look with distress at the entire contents of one’s refrigerator because most everything in it is the product of our remarkably broken industrial food system. It’s certainly compelling.
I’m not sure about Pollan’s choice to give the plants’ point of view, though. I suppose my resistance to anthropomorphizing plants might be just as much a result of prejudice as the slowly-crumbling resistance of many scientists to admitting that non-human animals have feelings, but... plants. Do they have opinions? Do they make plans? Even if they do, how would we possibly know? Plants are the true alien life form, more utterly unlike us than anything in a science fiction novel, and I’m not sure we can bridge that gap to communicate with them.
What I Plan to Read Next
Paradise Now has reminded me that I’ve long wanted to read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, which was based on his time at the commune at Brook Farm. The only other Hawthorne I’ve read was The Scarlet Letter, for ninth grade English, which did not leave me with a high opinion of Hawthorne, but surely he cannot fail to make a book about Brook Farm charming.
Paradise Now also reminded me that I’ve always intended to read Thomas More’s Utopia, but that is more along the lines of “a book I plan to read sometime in the future” than “a book I plan to read next.”
I already posted a review of Paradise Now, and nothing since then.
What I’m Reading Now
Louisa May Alcott’s Moods, and I have to say, I can totally see why posterity ignores this book in favor of Little Women and Alcott’s other children’s books. Alcott preferred writing about men (she mentions this numerous times, sometimes within her own books for girls), but most of her guy characters are sooooo booooring in comparison to the girls. (I make an exception for Laurie. He’s practically an honorary Marsh sister anyway.) Moods features a lantern-jawed paragon of manly self-reliance whose name I can’t even recall.
I’m also reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, which I am enjoying very much, insofar as one can enjoy a book that makes one look with distress at the entire contents of one’s refrigerator because most everything in it is the product of our remarkably broken industrial food system. It’s certainly compelling.
I’m not sure about Pollan’s choice to give the plants’ point of view, though. I suppose my resistance to anthropomorphizing plants might be just as much a result of prejudice as the slowly-crumbling resistance of many scientists to admitting that non-human animals have feelings, but... plants. Do they have opinions? Do they make plans? Even if they do, how would we possibly know? Plants are the true alien life form, more utterly unlike us than anything in a science fiction novel, and I’m not sure we can bridge that gap to communicate with them.
What I Plan to Read Next
Paradise Now has reminded me that I’ve long wanted to read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, which was based on his time at the commune at Brook Farm. The only other Hawthorne I’ve read was The Scarlet Letter, for ninth grade English, which did not leave me with a high opinion of Hawthorne, but surely he cannot fail to make a book about Brook Farm charming.
Paradise Now also reminded me that I’ve always intended to read Thomas More’s Utopia, but that is more along the lines of “a book I plan to read sometime in the future” than “a book I plan to read next.”
