![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Wednesday Reading Meme
Sep. 16th, 2020 07:16 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
I read Gerald Durrell’s The Drunken Forest, about his collecting trip in South America which was cut unfortunately short by a revolution in Paraguay. Durrell seems to be one of those people who lives more in six months than many people do in their entire lives: he’s just gotten together a good collection when the revolution makes it impossible to get most of his specimens out of the country, so he has to release the animals and leave on a rickety little plane… but within a few days he throws himself into collecting rheas (ostrich-like birds) on the pampas in Argentina. I aspire to react to setbacks with such sangfroid.
I also zoomed through Gale Galligan’s graphic novel adaptation of the Babysitters Club book Logan Likes Mary Anne!, which I don’t think I ever read in novel form. In fact, I’m not sure I ever read any of the first ten or so books in the Babysitters Club series, which is weird because I read so many of the others. Why, younger self??
I don’t know if M. F. K. Fisher herself revised How to Cook a Wolf, or if some later editor got a hold of her marginal notes and then inserted them into the main text, always [closed off with brackets] to show where the edits have been made. This makes for an annoyingly choppy reading experience, especially as the effect of the notes is almost always to diffuse the power of the original passage.
Otherwise I enjoyed the book, but boy do I wish I had a copy with the original unrevised text, or at very least a less disruptive way of adding in the revisions.
And finally, I galloped through Elizabeth Warnock Fernea’s A View of the Nile, about the years that she and her family spent in Egypt in the early 60s. The book is a bit slow to get started (I galloped partly because it’s an interlibrary loan with a tight turnaround time), but it hits its stride once Fernea and her husband leave Cairo for Nubia to complete an anthropological study before the Aswan Dam floods all the traditional Nubian villages.
I knew almost nothing about Nubia before reading this book, and Fernea paints such a fascinating picture of the Nubian community where she lives with her husband and two young children that I was left rather sorry that the book didn’t include an epilogue; I would have loved it if the book checked back in to see how the community fared after the Egyptian government transplanted it above the Aswan Dam.
What I’m Reading Now
I’m back in the saddle with Svetlana Aleksievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, although I have to take it slow: too much at once and you drown. The mother of a girl who was badly injured in a terrorist bombing on the Moscow Metro tells Aleksievich, “You’re a writer, you’ll understand what I mean: Words have very little in common with what goes on inside of you.” And yet she keeps talking, and Aleksievich keeps recording: words are insufficient, but they are all we have.
Also, a quote from Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope against Hope, her memoir about her husband (the poet Osip Mandelstam)’s arrest and the Stalinist era more generally. She’s musing, here, about a fellow that she thinks might have informed on Mandelstam: “But he scarcely matters. He was just a poor wretch who happened to live in terrible times. Can a man really be held accountable for his own actions? His behavior, even his character, is always in the merciless grip of the age, which squeezes out of him the drop of good or evil that it needs from him.”
What I Plan to Read Next
I’m pining away for Alex Halberstadt’s Young Heroes of the Soviet Union: A Memoir and a Reckoning. I’m first in line on the holds list! Hurry up and read the book, person who has it checked out!!!
I read Gerald Durrell’s The Drunken Forest, about his collecting trip in South America which was cut unfortunately short by a revolution in Paraguay. Durrell seems to be one of those people who lives more in six months than many people do in their entire lives: he’s just gotten together a good collection when the revolution makes it impossible to get most of his specimens out of the country, so he has to release the animals and leave on a rickety little plane… but within a few days he throws himself into collecting rheas (ostrich-like birds) on the pampas in Argentina. I aspire to react to setbacks with such sangfroid.
I also zoomed through Gale Galligan’s graphic novel adaptation of the Babysitters Club book Logan Likes Mary Anne!, which I don’t think I ever read in novel form. In fact, I’m not sure I ever read any of the first ten or so books in the Babysitters Club series, which is weird because I read so many of the others. Why, younger self??
I don’t know if M. F. K. Fisher herself revised How to Cook a Wolf, or if some later editor got a hold of her marginal notes and then inserted them into the main text, always [closed off with brackets] to show where the edits have been made. This makes for an annoyingly choppy reading experience, especially as the effect of the notes is almost always to diffuse the power of the original passage.
Otherwise I enjoyed the book, but boy do I wish I had a copy with the original unrevised text, or at very least a less disruptive way of adding in the revisions.
And finally, I galloped through Elizabeth Warnock Fernea’s A View of the Nile, about the years that she and her family spent in Egypt in the early 60s. The book is a bit slow to get started (I galloped partly because it’s an interlibrary loan with a tight turnaround time), but it hits its stride once Fernea and her husband leave Cairo for Nubia to complete an anthropological study before the Aswan Dam floods all the traditional Nubian villages.
I knew almost nothing about Nubia before reading this book, and Fernea paints such a fascinating picture of the Nubian community where she lives with her husband and two young children that I was left rather sorry that the book didn’t include an epilogue; I would have loved it if the book checked back in to see how the community fared after the Egyptian government transplanted it above the Aswan Dam.
What I’m Reading Now
I’m back in the saddle with Svetlana Aleksievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, although I have to take it slow: too much at once and you drown. The mother of a girl who was badly injured in a terrorist bombing on the Moscow Metro tells Aleksievich, “You’re a writer, you’ll understand what I mean: Words have very little in common with what goes on inside of you.” And yet she keeps talking, and Aleksievich keeps recording: words are insufficient, but they are all we have.
Also, a quote from Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope against Hope, her memoir about her husband (the poet Osip Mandelstam)’s arrest and the Stalinist era more generally. She’s musing, here, about a fellow that she thinks might have informed on Mandelstam: “But he scarcely matters. He was just a poor wretch who happened to live in terrible times. Can a man really be held accountable for his own actions? His behavior, even his character, is always in the merciless grip of the age, which squeezes out of him the drop of good or evil that it needs from him.”
What I Plan to Read Next
I’m pining away for Alex Halberstadt’s Young Heroes of the Soviet Union: A Memoir and a Reckoning. I’m first in line on the holds list! Hurry up and read the book, person who has it checked out!!!
