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Wednesday Reading Meme
Sep. 28th, 2016 07:53 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
I’ve already reviewed it all!
What I’m Reading Now
Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, which has just about broken me; it’s so sad I can’t even cry over it. Paul Baumer is an infantry soldier in the German army in World War II, who goes to the front, gets sent back from the front, loses this friend and that friend and a new recruit (the new recruits go down like mayflies), moves through the world like an exhausted ghost. It’s shell shock in novel form and I can only read a chapter at a time because it clings to me afterward.
I’ve also started reading Caroline Winterer’s American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason, which is about the various iterations of enlightenment in eighteenth-century America (and I think also by extension in Europe; the book is about the cross-pollination of ideas between the two continents). So far she has written about eighteenth-century library travelogues - surely the best kind of a travelogue - and learned letter-writing networks, which filled me with a certain epistolary covetousness.
What I Plan to Read Next
One of my friends from Captain America fandom sent me Norman Lindsay’s The Magic Pudding! Which is apparently quite famous in Australia. So probably that; anything called The Magic Pudding has to be a good antidote to All Quiet on the Western Front.
I’ve already reviewed it all!
What I’m Reading Now
Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, which has just about broken me; it’s so sad I can’t even cry over it. Paul Baumer is an infantry soldier in the German army in World War II, who goes to the front, gets sent back from the front, loses this friend and that friend and a new recruit (the new recruits go down like mayflies), moves through the world like an exhausted ghost. It’s shell shock in novel form and I can only read a chapter at a time because it clings to me afterward.
I’ve also started reading Caroline Winterer’s American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason, which is about the various iterations of enlightenment in eighteenth-century America (and I think also by extension in Europe; the book is about the cross-pollination of ideas between the two continents). So far she has written about eighteenth-century library travelogues - surely the best kind of a travelogue - and learned letter-writing networks, which filled me with a certain epistolary covetousness.
What I Plan to Read Next
One of my friends from Captain America fandom sent me Norman Lindsay’s The Magic Pudding! Which is apparently quite famous in Australia. So probably that; anything called The Magic Pudding has to be a good antidote to All Quiet on the Western Front.
