Wednesday Reading Meme
What I’ve Just Finished Reading
My hold on George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London finally came in and I instantly tossed everything else aside and tore through it. Excellent book: it’s Orwell’s memoirs about his experiences when he was flat broke, first in Paris (where he worked as a plongeur, a dishwasher in a French restaurant) and then in London, where he lived among the tramps, with occasional forays into theory, most notably in his pointed comment that the reason tramps exist is that they’re not allowed to stay in the same casual ward more than one night in a row, so they have to tramp to get to a different one to stay out. Policy, not poverty - or perhaps policy combined with poverty? - created tramps.
In Paris, Orwell pals around with a Russian emigre named Boris, who bears enough similarities to the Boris in The Goldfinch (which I also finished this week! Post forthcoming!) that I sometimes had the weird sense of slipping between books.
I also read Erika Owen’s The Art of Flaneuring: How to Wander with Intention and Discover a Better Life, a svelte little book about the joy of taking walks, mostly because sometimes in the winter I need a kick in the pants to actually get me outside in the cold. It worked! I went outside and took a long walk and found a house with a turquoise door and another that exists in a state of perpetual autumn, with faded Halloween decorations in the windows and dead leaves in the yard.
Also big fuzzy buds on the magnolia tree, which is worrisome from a magnolia-flower perspective, because the low is going to be five degrees Fahrenheit tomorrow and I suspect that will kill those magnolia buds dead.
What I’m Reading Now
I’ve become reading Wendell Berry’s essays in The Art of the Commonplace and I think I love him. It’s funny, because I’ve always heard him described as a conservative thinker, but a lot of his critiques - of the exploitative nature of the technological economy, both ecologically and in terms of labor relations - sound like something a leftist essayist might write today. (I don’t think this means that our political spectrum has shifted rightward, but rather reflects a fundamental change in the nature of American conservativism, which in its Trumpian incarnation is on the side of the exploiters.)
It’s crushing to read an essay Berry wrote circa 1970, say, where he puts his finger directly on the problem with the American government’s environmental policies, or American society’s attitudes toward low-status labor (this is a good companion piece to Orwell, it occurs to me), and know that not only has nothing changed over the past fifty years, but we’re currently going backward.
But he’s also snarky! Like this summation of the letters people wrote criticizing his refusal to buy a computer: “Some of us, it seems, would be better off if we would just realize that this is already the best of all possible worlds, and is going to get even better if we will just buy the right equipment.”
What I Plan to Read Next
Perhaps I’ll finally read Flight #116 Is Down? I got it from the library basically right after![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rachelmanija reviewed it, and I keep putting it off because I know from experience that once I start reading a Caroline B. Cooney book, that’s all I’m doing till the book is done… So I keep looking at it and being all “But can I really devote the next few hours of my life to this book?”
Yes, self! You can! Especially given that it’s not particularly long. (I really miss the svelteness of 90s children’s and YA novels. The trend now seems to be toward thicker books, and of course some books need to be that big, but many don’t.)
My hold on George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London finally came in and I instantly tossed everything else aside and tore through it. Excellent book: it’s Orwell’s memoirs about his experiences when he was flat broke, first in Paris (where he worked as a plongeur, a dishwasher in a French restaurant) and then in London, where he lived among the tramps, with occasional forays into theory, most notably in his pointed comment that the reason tramps exist is that they’re not allowed to stay in the same casual ward more than one night in a row, so they have to tramp to get to a different one to stay out. Policy, not poverty - or perhaps policy combined with poverty? - created tramps.
In Paris, Orwell pals around with a Russian emigre named Boris, who bears enough similarities to the Boris in The Goldfinch (which I also finished this week! Post forthcoming!) that I sometimes had the weird sense of slipping between books.
I also read Erika Owen’s The Art of Flaneuring: How to Wander with Intention and Discover a Better Life, a svelte little book about the joy of taking walks, mostly because sometimes in the winter I need a kick in the pants to actually get me outside in the cold. It worked! I went outside and took a long walk and found a house with a turquoise door and another that exists in a state of perpetual autumn, with faded Halloween decorations in the windows and dead leaves in the yard.
Also big fuzzy buds on the magnolia tree, which is worrisome from a magnolia-flower perspective, because the low is going to be five degrees Fahrenheit tomorrow and I suspect that will kill those magnolia buds dead.
What I’m Reading Now
I’ve become reading Wendell Berry’s essays in The Art of the Commonplace and I think I love him. It’s funny, because I’ve always heard him described as a conservative thinker, but a lot of his critiques - of the exploitative nature of the technological economy, both ecologically and in terms of labor relations - sound like something a leftist essayist might write today. (I don’t think this means that our political spectrum has shifted rightward, but rather reflects a fundamental change in the nature of American conservativism, which in its Trumpian incarnation is on the side of the exploiters.)
It’s crushing to read an essay Berry wrote circa 1970, say, where he puts his finger directly on the problem with the American government’s environmental policies, or American society’s attitudes toward low-status labor (this is a good companion piece to Orwell, it occurs to me), and know that not only has nothing changed over the past fifty years, but we’re currently going backward.
But he’s also snarky! Like this summation of the letters people wrote criticizing his refusal to buy a computer: “Some of us, it seems, would be better off if we would just realize that this is already the best of all possible worlds, and is going to get even better if we will just buy the right equipment.”
What I Plan to Read Next
Perhaps I’ll finally read Flight #116 Is Down? I got it from the library basically right after
rachelmanija reviewed it, and I keep putting it off because I know from experience that once I start reading a Caroline B. Cooney book, that’s all I’m doing till the book is done… So I keep looking at it and being all “But can I really devote the next few hours of my life to this book?” Yes, self! You can! Especially given that it’s not particularly long. (I really miss the svelteness of 90s children’s and YA novels. The trend now seems to be toward thicker books, and of course some books need to be that big, but many don’t.)