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Wednesday Reading Meme
Feb. 7th, 2018 09:10 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
A hankering for Sutcliff came upon me, and I discovered to my delight that the library has a Sutcliff book I hadn’t read before. (Well, it also has a few of her retellings - Beowulf etc. - but I haven’t liked her retellings as much as her original fiction.) Heather, Oak, and Olive is a collection of three short stories and scratched my itch famously.
I particularly liked the last story, in which an Athenian and a Spartan become fast friends at the Olympic Games - despite the fact that, when the truce of the games is over, their countries will go right back to being at war. It’s very Sutcliffian: the friendship-at-first-sight and their tight bond, and also the fact that this friendship, while real, can’t overcome the gap between them. “Far more likely, if they ever saw each other again, it would be over the tops of their shields,” the hero Amyntas thinks, and his Spartan friend, answering that unspoken thought, says in farewell, “The Gods be with you, Amyntas, and grant that we never meet again.”
I also read Laurie Colwin’s More Home Cooking: A Writer Returns to the Kitchen, which doesn’t reach quite the level of rhapsodic specificity that I prefer from my food memoirs, but did remind me that I’ve been meaning to read Elizabeth David’s work (Adam Gopnik also mentions David’s books in The Table Comes First), so I’ve put one on hold at the library.
And I read another Aunt Dimity book, because why not?
What I’m Reading Now
“The romanticizing of the artist, of course, has a flip side, a culture that often demeans, ridicules, or dismisses them, and artists soon learn that a strong ego is necessary if they are to practice their art. They learn that they must invent themselves, and in boldly appropriating for their art the raw material of their own lives, they are well served by a level of self-assurance and self-confidence that others find daunting, and often misread as self-satisfaction, or the annoying self-aggrandizement of the artist manque. I suspect this was part of my trouble at the Institute that fall. When I spoke as an artist, I was being heard as an artiste, a throwback to what Louise Bogan once termed ‘the disease of Shelleyism.’”
Kathleen Norris makes this observation in The Cloister Walk, and I suspect that it is 100% accurate, although not in the way that she intends it to be: she absolutely does come across as a self-satisfied artiste, convinced of her superiority vis-a-vis the academics who are her colleagues at the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research.
Or no. If she were convinced, her superiority might be less irritating. But she seems to be overcompensating for the fact that she feels, as she admits, “ill at ease in the academic environment”: she feels stupid, and is trying to offload that feeling onto the academics by scoffing that they have mere credentials while she has a calling. The result is a self-aggrandizing condescension that practically oozes out of the page.
If it oozed out in her dinnertime conversation at the Institute, too, how could her colleagues not loathe her? If you want people to like you, don’t treat them like you think they’re stupid little left-brained worker ants who could never rise to the beautiful and delicate butterfly heights that you attain as a ~poet~.
I’ve also finally made some progress in A Skinful of Shadows! But this post is already getting a bit ludicrous so I will report back on that later.
What I Plan to Read Next
I’ve read most of Rosemary Sutcliff’s main works, but still hope to find her book Simon someday. It may very well be available as an ebook, but… I want to read it on paper. It’s good to have a quest, I suppose!
I’m also getting quite impatient for this year’s Newbery winner to be announced. Come on, ALA! Hook me up!
A hankering for Sutcliff came upon me, and I discovered to my delight that the library has a Sutcliff book I hadn’t read before. (Well, it also has a few of her retellings - Beowulf etc. - but I haven’t liked her retellings as much as her original fiction.) Heather, Oak, and Olive is a collection of three short stories and scratched my itch famously.
I particularly liked the last story, in which an Athenian and a Spartan become fast friends at the Olympic Games - despite the fact that, when the truce of the games is over, their countries will go right back to being at war. It’s very Sutcliffian: the friendship-at-first-sight and their tight bond, and also the fact that this friendship, while real, can’t overcome the gap between them. “Far more likely, if they ever saw each other again, it would be over the tops of their shields,” the hero Amyntas thinks, and his Spartan friend, answering that unspoken thought, says in farewell, “The Gods be with you, Amyntas, and grant that we never meet again.”
I also read Laurie Colwin’s More Home Cooking: A Writer Returns to the Kitchen, which doesn’t reach quite the level of rhapsodic specificity that I prefer from my food memoirs, but did remind me that I’ve been meaning to read Elizabeth David’s work (Adam Gopnik also mentions David’s books in The Table Comes First), so I’ve put one on hold at the library.
And I read another Aunt Dimity book, because why not?
What I’m Reading Now
“The romanticizing of the artist, of course, has a flip side, a culture that often demeans, ridicules, or dismisses them, and artists soon learn that a strong ego is necessary if they are to practice their art. They learn that they must invent themselves, and in boldly appropriating for their art the raw material of their own lives, they are well served by a level of self-assurance and self-confidence that others find daunting, and often misread as self-satisfaction, or the annoying self-aggrandizement of the artist manque. I suspect this was part of my trouble at the Institute that fall. When I spoke as an artist, I was being heard as an artiste, a throwback to what Louise Bogan once termed ‘the disease of Shelleyism.’”
Kathleen Norris makes this observation in The Cloister Walk, and I suspect that it is 100% accurate, although not in the way that she intends it to be: she absolutely does come across as a self-satisfied artiste, convinced of her superiority vis-a-vis the academics who are her colleagues at the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research.
Or no. If she were convinced, her superiority might be less irritating. But she seems to be overcompensating for the fact that she feels, as she admits, “ill at ease in the academic environment”: she feels stupid, and is trying to offload that feeling onto the academics by scoffing that they have mere credentials while she has a calling. The result is a self-aggrandizing condescension that practically oozes out of the page.
If it oozed out in her dinnertime conversation at the Institute, too, how could her colleagues not loathe her? If you want people to like you, don’t treat them like you think they’re stupid little left-brained worker ants who could never rise to the beautiful and delicate butterfly heights that you attain as a ~poet~.
I’ve also finally made some progress in A Skinful of Shadows! But this post is already getting a bit ludicrous so I will report back on that later.
What I Plan to Read Next
I’ve read most of Rosemary Sutcliff’s main works, but still hope to find her book Simon someday. It may very well be available as an ebook, but… I want to read it on paper. It’s good to have a quest, I suppose!
I’m also getting quite impatient for this year’s Newbery winner to be announced. Come on, ALA! Hook me up!
