Wednesday Reading Meme

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Zola’s Nana. I rather think Zola intended me to dislike everyone in this book, but in fact I just ended up feeling terribly sorry for them all: they all seem so human and stupid and tragic, wasting their lives and their treasures buying pleasures that give them no happiness. Not that they would be likely to get happiness from anything else, either. Does happiness even exist in Zola’s world? No one got to be happy in Germinal either.

In any case, I really liked the book. It gives such a clear and evocative picture of such an alien world, the nineteenth-century French theater and demimonde, and I think Nana in particular is a wonderfully complex character. (I also think you could probably make a strongly-supported textual argument that she has borderline personality disorder or possibly C-PTSD, which is impressive given that neither diagnosis was even a glimmer in anyone's eye at that point.) But it's definitely not for the faint of heart.

What I’m Reading Now

Nearly done with Eva Ibbotson’s The Star of Kazan. Annika has been rescued from the evil boarding school where her mother sent her! (Her mother’s portrayal is totally chilling, by the way, because she’s so good at acting like she has Annika’s best interests at heart: she presents the Evil Boarding School as a lovely surprise that will surely fill Annika with joy.) But will she be able to stay with her adoptive family in Vienna????

I mean, of course she will, because it’s an Ibbotson book, but I’m worried how they’re going to keep Annika’s mother from coming and taking her away again. Unless I’m right and it turns out that her mother is not actually her mother after all? WE SHALL SEE.

What I Plan to Read Next

Still Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. I meant to start it last week, but then I got sidetracked by Nana.

Packing!

One of my friends is going to shlep some of my things down to Indianapolis in advance of the move, so I am in the process of packing! I have packed my kitchen stuff - actually not that much kitchen stuff; my new roommate has a well-stocked kitchen already, but I like to have my favorite plate and my sharp terrifying knives around - my desk stuff, which is like 90% devoted to letter-writing, and I had not realized that I had that much letter paraphrenalia, wow.

I have dusted the furniture that I will be taking with me and washed sheets and blankets that have reposed two years in waiting, and in short packed pretty much everything except my clothes as I still need those -

Although I could get a jump on packing up my winter clothes. Hmm.

But no! That would just be procrastinating, for I have come upon the most difficult part of the packing process: deciding which books to pack.

Eventually the answer will be "all of them, or at least a lot of them, I'm not sure all of them would fit in my room," but first I would need to buy some bookshelves. So for now I need to decide which books will fit in my bedside table which is also a bookshelf, which is a very small number and therefore caused me much grief and woe until I realized that I should refocus my thinking on "Which books do I want to lend to my friends in Indianapolis?"

Which has simplified things! Although there are still hard choices. Of course I'm taking Code Name Verity (I hope they all like sadness), but after some waffling I decided to leave The Montmaray Journals behind: I don't have the third book in the series, because I didn't like it as much as the others, so I really can't recommend it even though I loved the third.

Or my Caroline B. Cooney books! I feel like we have outgrown the age where I can recommend Caroline B. Cooney books, like maybe you have to read them for the first time in your impressionable teens for them to work, even though Mummy is amazing and more books should feature a teenage girl with the secret heart of a jewelry thief.

...Maybe I should actually see if I can wedge Mummy in after all. You know, just in case.

I have also stuck in my entire collection of Zilpha Keatley Snyder and also The Count of Monte Cristo, although the latter is because I have decided to read it after all, because the chapters are the right length for bedtime reading. Perhaps I should switch out Jane Eyre and the Jane Austens? I feel like my roommate probably already has those, so I don't need to haul along a duplicate set. Decisions, decisions!