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Wednesday Reading Meme
Dec. 22nd, 2021 07:28 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Elif Batuman’s The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them spends less time on Russian literature than the title might lead you to expect, but as a memoir it’s wonderful. Whether she’s studying Uzbek in Samarkand or attending a Tolstoy conference as Yasnaya Polyana, she has a gift for meeting oddballs and delighting in absurdities, which makes for a fascinating, digressive, arrestingly peculiar book.
I also finished Carroll Watson Rankin’s Dandelion Cottage. I turned out to be quite wrong in my matchmaking prognostication: it turns out that ( Spoilers )
I discovered through Wikipedia that Dandelion Cottage is based on a real house, which does indeed look delightfully cozy, and is a lovely sunshiny yellow as any house called Dandelion Cottage ought to be.
And speaking of cozy house books, I also finished D. E. Stevenson’s Vittoria Cottage, which was a delight. I sometimes think it’s too bad that Miss Buncle’s Book tends to be most people’s entry to Stevenson these days - it’s a delightful book too but much frothier than many of her other books, which are still light in atmosphere but have a bit more heft to them.
This one, for instance - a romance between a mother with grown children and a man rebuilding a life after years away in the war - has a very gentle atmosphere, but the losses and hardships of the war hang in the background. It’s a book about adjusting to a new normal as it becomes clear that the old normal, although it may be approximated in some ways, is never coming back, and as such felt very topical right now, and it was such a pleasure to see the characters trying their best to capture joy.
What I’m Reading Now
I’m about a quarter of the way through Amor Towles’ The Lincoln Highway, a road trip novel set not long after World War II. ( Spoilers )
What I Plan to Read Next
I’ve somehow ended up with THREE trilogies that I’ll need to order through interlibrary loan to complete: D. E. Stevenson’s Vittoria Cottage trilogy, Mary Bard’s Best Friends series, and of course D. K. Broster’s Jacobite Trilogy. (I realize the last is available online, but there are some books that simply demand to be read on paper.) Well, it should keep the interlibrary loan office busy!
If I didn’t actually believe in my responsibility to tell Americans the truth about Turkey, nevertheless I did feel it was somehow wasteful of me to study Russian literature instead of Turkish literature. I had repeatedly been told in linguistics classes that all languages were universally complex, to a biologically determined degree. Didn’t that mean all languages were, objectively speaking, equally interesting? And I already knew Turkish; it had happened without any work, like a gift, and here I was tossing it away to break my head on a bunch of declensions that came effortlessly to anyone who happened to grow up in Russia.
Today, this strikes me as terrible reasoning. I now understand that love is a rare and valuable thing, and you don’t get to choose its object. You just go around getting hung up on all the least convenient things - and if the only obstacle in your way is a little extra work, then that’s the wonderful gift right there.
Elif Batuman’s The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them spends less time on Russian literature than the title might lead you to expect, but as a memoir it’s wonderful. Whether she’s studying Uzbek in Samarkand or attending a Tolstoy conference as Yasnaya Polyana, she has a gift for meeting oddballs and delighting in absurdities, which makes for a fascinating, digressive, arrestingly peculiar book.
I also finished Carroll Watson Rankin’s Dandelion Cottage. I turned out to be quite wrong in my matchmaking prognostication: it turns out that ( Spoilers )
I discovered through Wikipedia that Dandelion Cottage is based on a real house, which does indeed look delightfully cozy, and is a lovely sunshiny yellow as any house called Dandelion Cottage ought to be.
And speaking of cozy house books, I also finished D. E. Stevenson’s Vittoria Cottage, which was a delight. I sometimes think it’s too bad that Miss Buncle’s Book tends to be most people’s entry to Stevenson these days - it’s a delightful book too but much frothier than many of her other books, which are still light in atmosphere but have a bit more heft to them.
This one, for instance - a romance between a mother with grown children and a man rebuilding a life after years away in the war - has a very gentle atmosphere, but the losses and hardships of the war hang in the background. It’s a book about adjusting to a new normal as it becomes clear that the old normal, although it may be approximated in some ways, is never coming back, and as such felt very topical right now, and it was such a pleasure to see the characters trying their best to capture joy.
What I’m Reading Now
I’m about a quarter of the way through Amor Towles’ The Lincoln Highway, a road trip novel set not long after World War II. ( Spoilers )
What I Plan to Read Next
I’ve somehow ended up with THREE trilogies that I’ll need to order through interlibrary loan to complete: D. E. Stevenson’s Vittoria Cottage trilogy, Mary Bard’s Best Friends series, and of course D. K. Broster’s Jacobite Trilogy. (I realize the last is available online, but there are some books that simply demand to be read on paper.) Well, it should keep the interlibrary loan office busy!
