![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Wednesday Reading Meme
Jul. 29th, 2020 07:38 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
I finished Gerald Durrell’s Birds, Beasts, and Relatives, his second memoir about his childhood with his eccentric family on Corfu. He just comes up with the most beautiful metaphors, like this description of fallen olive leaves, “as curled and crisp as brandy-snaps.”
He’s also so good at painting character in just a few swift pen strokes. So many characters are lots of fun, but I think my very favorite is Gerry’s pretentious, sex-obsessed brother Larry. Upon learning that snails are hermaphroditic, and when two snails mate the female half of one snail mates with the male half of the other and vice-versa, Larry cries, “I think that’s unfair. All those damned slimy things wandering around seducing each other like mad all over the bushes, and having the pleasures of both sensations. Why couldn’t such a gift be given to the human race? That’s what I want to know.”
I also finished Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station, which was a fun ride (it reminded me of the bit in one of Ruth Reichl’s memoirs where she visited China right after it began to open up for tourists), but the ending was definitely “I’m run out of word count! How do I wrap this up in two thousand words or less?” (As I recall, this is not the first Mrs. Pollifax book that has run into this problem, so obviously I’m not reading these books for the endings.)
I also liked this piece of advice, which Mrs. Pollifax offers to an unhappy tour member: “There are no happy endings, Jenny, there are only happy people.”
What I’m Reading Now
Jeanine Basinger’s The Movie Musical! (The exclamation point is part of the title.) I’ve loved Basinger’s movie writing ever since I read Silent Stars back in high school, which kicked off a valiant but largely unsuccessful quest to fall in love with silent movies (she just makes them sound so fun!); fortunately, movie musicals are a genre that I already know I enjoy, so mostly what this book has done is give me MANY more titles to check out, like Ernst Lubitsch’s The Merry Widow. I also went through a Lubitsch stage back in high school, but somehow I missed that one.
What I Plan to Read Next
Guess whose hold on Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder arrived at the library? MINE!
I finished Gerald Durrell’s Birds, Beasts, and Relatives, his second memoir about his childhood with his eccentric family on Corfu. He just comes up with the most beautiful metaphors, like this description of fallen olive leaves, “as curled and crisp as brandy-snaps.”
He’s also so good at painting character in just a few swift pen strokes. So many characters are lots of fun, but I think my very favorite is Gerry’s pretentious, sex-obsessed brother Larry. Upon learning that snails are hermaphroditic, and when two snails mate the female half of one snail mates with the male half of the other and vice-versa, Larry cries, “I think that’s unfair. All those damned slimy things wandering around seducing each other like mad all over the bushes, and having the pleasures of both sensations. Why couldn’t such a gift be given to the human race? That’s what I want to know.”
I also finished Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station, which was a fun ride (it reminded me of the bit in one of Ruth Reichl’s memoirs where she visited China right after it began to open up for tourists), but the ending was definitely “I’m run out of word count! How do I wrap this up in two thousand words or less?” (As I recall, this is not the first Mrs. Pollifax book that has run into this problem, so obviously I’m not reading these books for the endings.)
I also liked this piece of advice, which Mrs. Pollifax offers to an unhappy tour member: “There are no happy endings, Jenny, there are only happy people.”
What I’m Reading Now
Jeanine Basinger’s The Movie Musical! (The exclamation point is part of the title.) I’ve loved Basinger’s movie writing ever since I read Silent Stars back in high school, which kicked off a valiant but largely unsuccessful quest to fall in love with silent movies (she just makes them sound so fun!); fortunately, movie musicals are a genre that I already know I enjoy, so mostly what this book has done is give me MANY more titles to check out, like Ernst Lubitsch’s The Merry Widow. I also went through a Lubitsch stage back in high school, but somehow I missed that one.
What I Plan to Read Next
Guess whose hold on Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder arrived at the library? MINE!
