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Wednesday Reading Meme
Oct. 7th, 2020 09:04 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
William Braxton Irvine published The Stoic Challenge: A Philosopher’s Guide to Becoming Tougher, Calmer, and More Resilient in 2019, but nonetheless it seems tailor-made for 2020, the year that pulls the rug out from under your feet again and again.
The book is about how to deal with unexpected setbacks: view them as a challenge, he suggests; this is of course much easier to do with smaller setbacks, although the ancient Roman stoics were famous for applying it in situations like “exile” and “being ordered to commit suicide by the Senate.” It’s also about how to appreciate what you have: imagine what it would be like not to have it, and, well, lucky us! in 2020, you don’t even need to exercise your imagination on this one. If there’s one thing Americans have all experienced this year, it’s suddenly not having things we always expected to have. Movie theaters, restaurants, food and toilet paper on the grocery shelves, being able to see people’s faces, the expectation of a peaceful transition of power after the election in November…
It’s all unpleasant, of course, but I remind myself that historically speaking, we are really only paddling in the shallows of just how bad things can get, as evidenced (in this week's reading) by Alex Halberstadt’s Young Heroes of the Soviet Union, which has a whole section on his maternal grandparents’ experiences escaping the Holocaust as Lithuanian Jews.
I actually got the book because I was interested in Halberstadt’s experience growing up gay in the Soviet Union. But in actual fact his family left the USSR when he was still a child, so there’s not too much for him to say about it; the most interesting tidbit is that he had his first sexual awakening looking at the illustrations in the textbook Young Heroes of the Soviet Union, a sort of Soviet martyrology of young people dying heroic, gruesome, patriotic deaths. (I imagined this sexually awakened MANY Soviet youths, of all sexual orientations.)
I also learned from this book that in Russian, chanterelles are lisichki, little foxes, which would have been ADORABLE in Honeytrap, oh my God.
Maybe I should stop reading about the Soviet Union for a bit. I seem to have this “that would have been AMAZING to include in Honeytrap” reaction to at least one tidbit from every book.
What I’m Reading Now
Continuing on in Jeannette Ng’s Under the Pendulum Sun. I’m enjoying the worldbuilding, particularly the imaginary Victorian theology of the fae (do they have souls or don’t they?), but boy, it would’ve been nice if the incest had been mentioned a little bit in the blurb. I suppose whoever wrote it must have thought comparing the book to Crimson Peak counted as due diligence?
I’m also working on Sally Belfrage’s Freedom Summer and of course Mary Renault’s The Charioteer, but I’m going to write full reviews for both of them once I’m done, so I won’t take up space talking about them here. (Oh, well, fine, for the Charioteer contingent, I will mention that I got to the part ( Spoilers ))
Another quote from Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope against Hope:
What I Plan to Read Next
I’ve had Robert Louis Stevenson’s Catriona (called David Balfour in the United States; the lesser-known sequel to Kidnapped!) lying around for weeks and I really ought to just read it.
William Braxton Irvine published The Stoic Challenge: A Philosopher’s Guide to Becoming Tougher, Calmer, and More Resilient in 2019, but nonetheless it seems tailor-made for 2020, the year that pulls the rug out from under your feet again and again.
The book is about how to deal with unexpected setbacks: view them as a challenge, he suggests; this is of course much easier to do with smaller setbacks, although the ancient Roman stoics were famous for applying it in situations like “exile” and “being ordered to commit suicide by the Senate.” It’s also about how to appreciate what you have: imagine what it would be like not to have it, and, well, lucky us! in 2020, you don’t even need to exercise your imagination on this one. If there’s one thing Americans have all experienced this year, it’s suddenly not having things we always expected to have. Movie theaters, restaurants, food and toilet paper on the grocery shelves, being able to see people’s faces, the expectation of a peaceful transition of power after the election in November…
It’s all unpleasant, of course, but I remind myself that historically speaking, we are really only paddling in the shallows of just how bad things can get, as evidenced (in this week's reading) by Alex Halberstadt’s Young Heroes of the Soviet Union, which has a whole section on his maternal grandparents’ experiences escaping the Holocaust as Lithuanian Jews.
I actually got the book because I was interested in Halberstadt’s experience growing up gay in the Soviet Union. But in actual fact his family left the USSR when he was still a child, so there’s not too much for him to say about it; the most interesting tidbit is that he had his first sexual awakening looking at the illustrations in the textbook Young Heroes of the Soviet Union, a sort of Soviet martyrology of young people dying heroic, gruesome, patriotic deaths. (I imagined this sexually awakened MANY Soviet youths, of all sexual orientations.)
I also learned from this book that in Russian, chanterelles are lisichki, little foxes, which would have been ADORABLE in Honeytrap, oh my God.
Maybe I should stop reading about the Soviet Union for a bit. I seem to have this “that would have been AMAZING to include in Honeytrap” reaction to at least one tidbit from every book.
What I’m Reading Now
Continuing on in Jeannette Ng’s Under the Pendulum Sun. I’m enjoying the worldbuilding, particularly the imaginary Victorian theology of the fae (do they have souls or don’t they?), but boy, it would’ve been nice if the incest had been mentioned a little bit in the blurb. I suppose whoever wrote it must have thought comparing the book to Crimson Peak counted as due diligence?
I’m also working on Sally Belfrage’s Freedom Summer and of course Mary Renault’s The Charioteer, but I’m going to write full reviews for both of them once I’m done, so I won’t take up space talking about them here. (Oh, well, fine, for the Charioteer contingent, I will mention that I got to the part ( Spoilers ))
Another quote from Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope against Hope:
The true believers were not only sure of their own triumph, they also thought they were bringing happiness to the rest of mankind as well, and their view of the world had such a sweeping, unitary quality that it was very seductive. In the pre-revolutionary era there had already been this craving for an all-embracing idea which would explain everything in the world and bring about universal harmony in one go. That is why people so willingly closed their eyes and followed their leader, not allowing themselves to compare words to deeds, or to weigh the consequences of their action. This explained the progressive loss of a sense of reality - which had to be regained before there could be any question of discovering what had been wrong with the theory in the first place.
What I Plan to Read Next
I’ve had Robert Louis Stevenson’s Catriona (called David Balfour in the United States; the lesser-known sequel to Kidnapped!) lying around for weeks and I really ought to just read it.
