Wednesday Reading Meme
Dec. 29th, 2021 09:29 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
This week I finished two books that I’ve been working on for ages: Judith Flanders’ Christmas: A Biography, which I started last Christmas, and Brian Switek’s My Beloved Brontosaurus: On the Road with Old Bones, New Science, and Our Favorite Dinosaurs, which I’ve been reading intermittently since… possibly before the pandemic, God help us all.
I’ve loved some of Flanders’ other books (Inside the Victorian Home was my gateway drug to the nineteenth century), but I found Christmas: A Biography a slog. However, I was interested to learn that possibly the oldest extant Christmas tradition is “complaining that Christmas is too secular these days.” Apparently churchmen have been complaining about that essentially since the beginning of Christmas, whereas almost all the other age-old Christmas traditions (Christmas trees, carols, mummers’ plays, even Yule logs) are of more recent origin.
In contrast, I enjoyed My Beloved Brontosaurus while I was reading it… but once I put it down I never felt any impetus to pick it back up, hence the fact that it languished for months at a time. However, it is a good update on What’s New in Dinosaur Science since I was seven. (Probably a bit outdated now, as the book was published in 2013.) I was particularly delighted when Switek name-checked my younger self’s very FAVORITE dinosaur documentary, the 1992 PBS four-parter The Dinosaurs!, featuring such luminaries as Jack Horner and Bob Bakker. (The latter of whom gave a talk at the local university when I was eleven or so, which I of course attended spellbound.)
I also read Howard Caldwell’s The Golden Age of Indianapolis Theaters, partly as research for my Depression-era tramps book (thus discovering that my heroes could not have attended a summer matinee at the Indiana theater in 1937, as it was closed that summer, clearly a question which will animate MANY readers) but also as more general research for a possible Indianapolis book. Plans for this still extremely nascent!
What I’m Reading Now
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skygiants' wonderful review of Aoka Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are reminded me what a good job the translator Polly Barton did, so I thought I’d check if the library had any of her other translations. It does, sort of! Izumi Suzuki’s Terminal Boredom is a collection of seven stories, translated by six different translators, so potentially this is a good way to find more translators I like?
I must admit that the first story does not bode well for the rest of the collection. It’s called “Women and Women,” and the heroine lives in a society where the dwindling supply of men are kept locked away in prison-like hospitals, but one night she sees a ~boy outside her window and even though she’s never seen a man before she can tell he’s a boy because of his ~ineluctable masculinity~, etc. etc., and also technology and infrastructure are crumbling because the men used up all the resources before going into decline (isn’t that just like them?) and also maybe women just don’t know how to repair roads. Has anyone read this book? Are the other short stories worth it or should I cut my losses?
I’m also about halfway through James Otis’s Toby Tyler: Or, Ten Weeks with a Circus, which is heavier on “running away to join the circus is awful, actually,” than I was hoping, although there are a certain amount of madcap circus hijinks. Young Toby has been befriended by the Living Skeleton and his wife, the circus’s fat lady, an adorable couple.
What I Plan to Read Next
In my final Wednesday Reading Meme of 2020, I mused, “I need to attend more to what I want to read at this moment, and trust that the time will come for any book I really need to read,” and this philosophy has really worked out for me in 2021. It’s been truly a gem of a reading year and I hope I can keep that momentum going in 2022.
Authors at the top of my mind for further exploration: Mary Renault, Kazuo Ishiguro (I loved Klara and the Sun but have yet to follow up on his other books), D. K. Broster, D. E. Stevenson. I also intend to return to Japanese novels in translation. As well as Terminal Boredom, one came through the library just the other day: Natsuko Imamura’s The Woman in the Purple Skirt. Has anyone read it? Did you like it?
This week I finished two books that I’ve been working on for ages: Judith Flanders’ Christmas: A Biography, which I started last Christmas, and Brian Switek’s My Beloved Brontosaurus: On the Road with Old Bones, New Science, and Our Favorite Dinosaurs, which I’ve been reading intermittently since… possibly before the pandemic, God help us all.
I’ve loved some of Flanders’ other books (Inside the Victorian Home was my gateway drug to the nineteenth century), but I found Christmas: A Biography a slog. However, I was interested to learn that possibly the oldest extant Christmas tradition is “complaining that Christmas is too secular these days.” Apparently churchmen have been complaining about that essentially since the beginning of Christmas, whereas almost all the other age-old Christmas traditions (Christmas trees, carols, mummers’ plays, even Yule logs) are of more recent origin.
In contrast, I enjoyed My Beloved Brontosaurus while I was reading it… but once I put it down I never felt any impetus to pick it back up, hence the fact that it languished for months at a time. However, it is a good update on What’s New in Dinosaur Science since I was seven. (Probably a bit outdated now, as the book was published in 2013.) I was particularly delighted when Switek name-checked my younger self’s very FAVORITE dinosaur documentary, the 1992 PBS four-parter The Dinosaurs!, featuring such luminaries as Jack Horner and Bob Bakker. (The latter of whom gave a talk at the local university when I was eleven or so, which I of course attended spellbound.)
I also read Howard Caldwell’s The Golden Age of Indianapolis Theaters, partly as research for my Depression-era tramps book (thus discovering that my heroes could not have attended a summer matinee at the Indiana theater in 1937, as it was closed that summer, clearly a question which will animate MANY readers) but also as more general research for a possible Indianapolis book. Plans for this still extremely nascent!
What I’m Reading Now
skygiants' wonderful review of Aoka Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are reminded me what a good job the translator Polly Barton did, so I thought I’d check if the library had any of her other translations. It does, sort of! Izumi Suzuki’s Terminal Boredom is a collection of seven stories, translated by six different translators, so potentially this is a good way to find more translators I like? I must admit that the first story does not bode well for the rest of the collection. It’s called “Women and Women,” and the heroine lives in a society where the dwindling supply of men are kept locked away in prison-like hospitals, but one night she sees a ~boy outside her window and even though she’s never seen a man before she can tell he’s a boy because of his ~ineluctable masculinity~, etc. etc., and also technology and infrastructure are crumbling because the men used up all the resources before going into decline (isn’t that just like them?) and also maybe women just don’t know how to repair roads. Has anyone read this book? Are the other short stories worth it or should I cut my losses?
I’m also about halfway through James Otis’s Toby Tyler: Or, Ten Weeks with a Circus, which is heavier on “running away to join the circus is awful, actually,” than I was hoping, although there are a certain amount of madcap circus hijinks. Young Toby has been befriended by the Living Skeleton and his wife, the circus’s fat lady, an adorable couple.
What I Plan to Read Next
In my final Wednesday Reading Meme of 2020, I mused, “I need to attend more to what I want to read at this moment, and trust that the time will come for any book I really need to read,” and this philosophy has really worked out for me in 2021. It’s been truly a gem of a reading year and I hope I can keep that momentum going in 2022.
Authors at the top of my mind for further exploration: Mary Renault, Kazuo Ishiguro (I loved Klara and the Sun but have yet to follow up on his other books), D. K. Broster, D. E. Stevenson. I also intend to return to Japanese novels in translation. As well as Terminal Boredom, one came through the library just the other day: Natsuko Imamura’s The Woman in the Purple Skirt. Has anyone read it? Did you like it?
