Wednesday Reading Meme
Jun. 20th, 2018 08:23 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Dorothy Sayers’ Clouds of Witness, the second Peter Wimsey book, which is jolly interesting though tragically lacking in Harriet Vane. Should I start swooping through all the rest of the Wimsey novels, or should I ration them out and make them last? A quandary.
I also finished Frances Little’s Camp Jolly, in which three young boys camp in the Grand Canyon and have even grander adventures. The book ends with a hook for a sequel - next they’re going to have adventures in the Great War! - but as far as I can tell the sequel never materialized. Possibly contemporary reaction to this novel was as lukewarm as my own.
I also finished A. A. Milne’s Once on a Time, which I wasn’t sure about at first because it’s so very light that it practically floats - but sometimes you need something very light and in the end its winsome charm did indeed win me. It’s a… I’m not sure what genre to call it exactly. A gentle fairy tale parody?
What I’m Reading Now
Clemence Dane’s Regiment of Women, a book set in a girl’s school in the early twentieth century, focusing more on the teachers than on the girls.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
evelyn_b, I recommended this to you in a letter, and I feel that I ought to qualify this recommendation now that I am farther into it with the note that this book causes SO MANY EMOTIONS, there are moments when it’s like death by a thousand pinpricks.
And also one of the characters has done something so vile - particularly vile in its absolute pettiness - that I have begun to root for her to be utterly routed and destroyed, because here is a person who ought not to have power over anyone, ever, even the diffuse kind of power that comes from any particularly strong friendship.
Fortunately Alwynne has temporarily escaped her sway and gone to visit relations in the country, which also incidentally turns into a visit to one of those peculiar new coeducational boarding schools with socialist leanings: you can tell because they let the children go on rambles unsupervised rather than marching sedately two by two, with a teacher patrolling to ensure they don’t link arms.
I found the school stuff really interesting, but unfortunately it has been supplanted by A Man. He and Alwynne are clearly going to end up together, which will at least save Alwynne from her seemingly nice but secretly vile Machiavellian friend, but as much as I deprecate vile human beings in real life, their Machiavellian machinations do make for far more interesting reading than “Alwynne just compared this dude to Mr. Darcy. Clearly wedding bells are on the horizon.”
What I Plan to Read Next
We met our Summer Reading sign-up goal at work, so all of us staff members got to pick a summer reading prize, and naturally I got a book: Nancy Farmer’s House of the Scorpion. It looks - potentially scarring honestly; this is why I never read any of Farmer’s books in my youth, when they were a big deal (I remember seeing A Girl Named Disaster everywhere), they all looked potentially scarring. Possibly they are so good that it’s worth it. But still.
Dorothy Sayers’ Clouds of Witness, the second Peter Wimsey book, which is jolly interesting though tragically lacking in Harriet Vane. Should I start swooping through all the rest of the Wimsey novels, or should I ration them out and make them last? A quandary.
I also finished Frances Little’s Camp Jolly, in which three young boys camp in the Grand Canyon and have even grander adventures. The book ends with a hook for a sequel - next they’re going to have adventures in the Great War! - but as far as I can tell the sequel never materialized. Possibly contemporary reaction to this novel was as lukewarm as my own.
I also finished A. A. Milne’s Once on a Time, which I wasn’t sure about at first because it’s so very light that it practically floats - but sometimes you need something very light and in the end its winsome charm did indeed win me. It’s a… I’m not sure what genre to call it exactly. A gentle fairy tale parody?
What I’m Reading Now
Clemence Dane’s Regiment of Women, a book set in a girl’s school in the early twentieth century, focusing more on the teachers than on the girls.
evelyn_b, I recommended this to you in a letter, and I feel that I ought to qualify this recommendation now that I am farther into it with the note that this book causes SO MANY EMOTIONS, there are moments when it’s like death by a thousand pinpricks. And also one of the characters has done something so vile - particularly vile in its absolute pettiness - that I have begun to root for her to be utterly routed and destroyed, because here is a person who ought not to have power over anyone, ever, even the diffuse kind of power that comes from any particularly strong friendship.
Fortunately Alwynne has temporarily escaped her sway and gone to visit relations in the country, which also incidentally turns into a visit to one of those peculiar new coeducational boarding schools with socialist leanings: you can tell because they let the children go on rambles unsupervised rather than marching sedately two by two, with a teacher patrolling to ensure they don’t link arms.
I found the school stuff really interesting, but unfortunately it has been supplanted by A Man. He and Alwynne are clearly going to end up together, which will at least save Alwynne from her seemingly nice but secretly vile Machiavellian friend, but as much as I deprecate vile human beings in real life, their Machiavellian machinations do make for far more interesting reading than “Alwynne just compared this dude to Mr. Darcy. Clearly wedding bells are on the horizon.”
What I Plan to Read Next
We met our Summer Reading sign-up goal at work, so all of us staff members got to pick a summer reading prize, and naturally I got a book: Nancy Farmer’s House of the Scorpion. It looks - potentially scarring honestly; this is why I never read any of Farmer’s books in my youth, when they were a big deal (I remember seeing A Girl Named Disaster everywhere), they all looked potentially scarring. Possibly they are so good that it’s worth it. But still.
