Wednesday Reading Meme
Apr. 7th, 2021 08:16 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
AT LONG LAST I have finished Wilkie Collins’ Armadale! It probably would not have taken so long, but honestly I found the suspense so stressful that I often had to take breaks before I could go on… Perhaps not what you’d expect from a book that’s 150 years old, but what can I say, Wilkie Collins knows his craft.
( Spoilers )
After Armadale, I wanted something short to read as a palate cleanser, so I read Paula Fox’s One-Eyed Cat, in which a boy in upper New York in the 1930s gets an air rifle for his birthday, which his father forbids him to use… but the boy sneaks it out that night and shoots at a moving shadow - or maybe not a shadow? - it was really too dark to say, but when he sees a one-eyed cat later, he becomes convinced he shot that cat. Some lovely nature descriptions and a lovely picture of his relationship with his mother, who suffers from severe rheumatoid arthritis.
I also zoomed through Gerald Durrell’s The Whispering Land, in which Durrell travels to Argentina to film penguins and seals and gather specimens for his zoo, including “an orange-rumped agouti, a large rodent with dark eyes, slender legs and the disposition of a racehorse suffering from an acute nervous breakdown.” A jolly romp, like all of Durrell’s books. I also particularly enjoyed this description of trying to book passage home for a collection of animals:
What I’m Reading Now
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lucymonster recommended Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad and I’ve started reading it because I’m weak for all things Soviet… But it may take me some time to finish it, because the Soviet Union keeps losing entire armies because Stalin refuses to allow them to retreat, and then the Nazis encircle YET ANOTHER SOVIET ARMY and I shriek “WHY? WHY? WHY?” (this is a cry of existential angst rather than a request for clarification) and then I have to take a little break to read something else.
I’ve also been reading Monika Zgustova’s Dressed for a Dance in the Snow: Women’s Voices from the Gulag. I plan to write a longer review (or at least post a selection of quotes), but here’s one for the road. In 1950, Susanna Pechuro recalls, one of her teachers condemned a classmate’s poem as anti-Soviet:
“Don’t you see it’s sad? Some feelings are not meant for Soviet youth.”
“But we’re all sad sometimes,” I objected.
“Soviet youth should never be. Sadness is decadent,” the teacher cut me off.
This is five years after the end of World War II, in which those entire armies kept getting destroyed. But no sadness! Sadness is decadent, comrades!
What I Plan to Read Next
I’m back in the saddle with the Newbery Honor project. I’ve got seven books from the 90s left to go, plus the five (!) Newbery Honor books from this year.
AT LONG LAST I have finished Wilkie Collins’ Armadale! It probably would not have taken so long, but honestly I found the suspense so stressful that I often had to take breaks before I could go on… Perhaps not what you’d expect from a book that’s 150 years old, but what can I say, Wilkie Collins knows his craft.
( Spoilers )
After Armadale, I wanted something short to read as a palate cleanser, so I read Paula Fox’s One-Eyed Cat, in which a boy in upper New York in the 1930s gets an air rifle for his birthday, which his father forbids him to use… but the boy sneaks it out that night and shoots at a moving shadow - or maybe not a shadow? - it was really too dark to say, but when he sees a one-eyed cat later, he becomes convinced he shot that cat. Some lovely nature descriptions and a lovely picture of his relationship with his mother, who suffers from severe rheumatoid arthritis.
I also zoomed through Gerald Durrell’s The Whispering Land, in which Durrell travels to Argentina to film penguins and seals and gather specimens for his zoo, including “an orange-rumped agouti, a large rodent with dark eyes, slender legs and the disposition of a racehorse suffering from an acute nervous breakdown.” A jolly romp, like all of Durrell’s books. I also particularly enjoyed this description of trying to book passage home for a collection of animals:
Most shipping people, when you mention the words “animal cargo” to them grow pale, and get vivid mental pictures of the Captain being eviscerated on the bridge by a jaguar, the First Officer being slowly crushed in the coils of some enormous snake, while the passengers are pursued from one end of the ship to the other by a host of repulsive and deadly beasts of various species.
What I’m Reading Now
lucymonster recommended Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad and I’ve started reading it because I’m weak for all things Soviet… But it may take me some time to finish it, because the Soviet Union keeps losing entire armies because Stalin refuses to allow them to retreat, and then the Nazis encircle YET ANOTHER SOVIET ARMY and I shriek “WHY? WHY? WHY?” (this is a cry of existential angst rather than a request for clarification) and then I have to take a little break to read something else. I’ve also been reading Monika Zgustova’s Dressed for a Dance in the Snow: Women’s Voices from the Gulag. I plan to write a longer review (or at least post a selection of quotes), but here’s one for the road. In 1950, Susanna Pechuro recalls, one of her teachers condemned a classmate’s poem as anti-Soviet:
“Don’t you see it’s sad? Some feelings are not meant for Soviet youth.”
“But we’re all sad sometimes,” I objected.
“Soviet youth should never be. Sadness is decadent,” the teacher cut me off.
This is five years after the end of World War II, in which those entire armies kept getting destroyed. But no sadness! Sadness is decadent, comrades!
What I Plan to Read Next
I’m back in the saddle with the Newbery Honor project. I’ve got seven books from the 90s left to go, plus the five (!) Newbery Honor books from this year.
