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Wednesday Reading Meme
Aug. 31st, 2016 09:38 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
I finished Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Fair Barbarian, which is absolutely charming, and includes a scene with an unworthy suitor receiving a resounding smackdown, which I find so satisfying and very rarely see in fiction.
I also finished Ngaio Marsh’s Death of a Fool, which is also charming, although I think that Marsh’s peculiar village books are not quite as delightful as her theater or eccentric aristocrat books. This one reminded me very much of Death at the Bar, even though they’re similar in that both involve villages; I spent a certain percentage of the book trying to recall the other book, in fact, because I didn’t think it was the same book and yet it felt eerily familiar.
What I’m Reading Now
I’ve started Zola’s Nana! Generally speaking it seems rather quaint in nineteenth century English or American books when someone starts talking about the evils of ~French novels~, but reading Nana makes it easy to see why they were shocked. Nana is a prostitute transforming herself into an actress; she moves among the denizens of the demimonde, courtesans and the men who patronize them, and it’s a glittery, hollow, cynical place.
And Nana is of a piece with it. She’s not a prostitute with a heart of gold (something of a relief, really); she’s as hard and cynical as the world she moves in, with a few unexpected soft spots, notably an affection for her little son.
It’s not a book to read if you’re looking for likable characters, but it’s strangely fascinating all the same. The portrait of the world that it paints is so different from anything else I’ve ever read about.
I’m becoming quite concerned for Annika in Eva Ibbotson’s The Star of Kazan. I think her so-called relations, who have whisked her away from Vienna to a dingy collapsing castle in northern Germany, have somehow discovered her inheritance and are using her to try to get their grasping hands on it. Of course, Ibbotson being Ibbotson, I think Annika will escape in the end and make her way back to Vienna and probably become a gloriously virtuoso cook, but she’s going to be so sad when she realizes her supposed mother isn’t actually her mother.
Although perhaps by then she will also be a little bit relieved. So maybe she won’t be as devastated as I fear. And of course she can take her newfound friend the stable boy back to Vienna with her, and he can work with the Lippizaners, and all will be well.
What I Plan to Read Next
I’ve decided to read Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front for my next reading challenge, “a book I should have read in school.”
I finished Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Fair Barbarian, which is absolutely charming, and includes a scene with an unworthy suitor receiving a resounding smackdown, which I find so satisfying and very rarely see in fiction.
I also finished Ngaio Marsh’s Death of a Fool, which is also charming, although I think that Marsh’s peculiar village books are not quite as delightful as her theater or eccentric aristocrat books. This one reminded me very much of Death at the Bar, even though they’re similar in that both involve villages; I spent a certain percentage of the book trying to recall the other book, in fact, because I didn’t think it was the same book and yet it felt eerily familiar.
What I’m Reading Now
I’ve started Zola’s Nana! Generally speaking it seems rather quaint in nineteenth century English or American books when someone starts talking about the evils of ~French novels~, but reading Nana makes it easy to see why they were shocked. Nana is a prostitute transforming herself into an actress; she moves among the denizens of the demimonde, courtesans and the men who patronize them, and it’s a glittery, hollow, cynical place.
And Nana is of a piece with it. She’s not a prostitute with a heart of gold (something of a relief, really); she’s as hard and cynical as the world she moves in, with a few unexpected soft spots, notably an affection for her little son.
It’s not a book to read if you’re looking for likable characters, but it’s strangely fascinating all the same. The portrait of the world that it paints is so different from anything else I’ve ever read about.
I’m becoming quite concerned for Annika in Eva Ibbotson’s The Star of Kazan. I think her so-called relations, who have whisked her away from Vienna to a dingy collapsing castle in northern Germany, have somehow discovered her inheritance and are using her to try to get their grasping hands on it. Of course, Ibbotson being Ibbotson, I think Annika will escape in the end and make her way back to Vienna and probably become a gloriously virtuoso cook, but she’s going to be so sad when she realizes her supposed mother isn’t actually her mother.
Although perhaps by then she will also be a little bit relieved. So maybe she won’t be as devastated as I fear. And of course she can take her newfound friend the stable boy back to Vienna with her, and he can work with the Lippizaners, and all will be well.
What I Plan to Read Next
I’ve decided to read Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front for my next reading challenge, “a book I should have read in school.”
