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Wednesday Reading Meme
Sep. 28th, 2022 07:25 amA wild edition of Books I Quit Partway Through appears. I got about halfway through Montague Glass’s Potash & Perlmutter: Their Copartnership Ventures and Adventures, a series of comic vignettes about two Jewish men who co-own a cloak and garment business in New York City in the early twentieth century. (Glass himself was Jewish, and although he wasn’t in the cloak and garment trade he must have done a ton of research, because there’s loads of interesting detail.) But after the halfway mark I realized I still couldn’t reliably tell our two heroes apart, and decided that life was too short for books that are merely okay.
There are some funny lines. When they first meet, Abe bites into a dill pickle that squirts in Morris’s eye; Morris replies, “S'all right…I seen what you was doing and I should of ordered an umbrella instead of a glass of water already.” But basically it’s a humorous book where a lot of the humor has been lost to the sands of time.
What I’ve Just Finished Reading
Naomi Mitchison’s The Big House, which has a lovely Scottish flavor not only to the dialogue but the narrative, and the way that the sentences are constructed. I’ve seen the book described as a Tam Lin retelling, but it’s not so much a retelling as a fractal remix, and the story gets retold, and retold again, and then again, and each time it’s further from the original but also nonetheless referring back to it.
In traveling in and out of fairyland to help their friend the piper Donald Ferguson, Su and Winkie also travel back and forth through time, so the book is also a meditation on the history of Scotland (not so much the Jacobites as the enclosures), and on the class system of the British Isles, and on the wheel of fortune in the medieval sense: the fact that fortunes rise and fall and a family that is on top of the world one century may be nothing much in another.
The book is a bit of a mess: the pacing is choppy and it doesn’t really all come together. But I admire it for its ambitions even though it doesn’t quite fulfill them.
What I’m Reading Now
D. K. Broster’s The Wounded Name. I started reading this the other day while accompanying a friend shoe-shopping, and she asked what I was reading, and I explained, well, it’s this book from the 1920s… set near the end of the Napoleonic Wars… and our heroes have just met for the very first time, and one of them slipped into the flood-swollen river and the other leaped in after him to save him from drowning…
Kayla considered the matter. “So 1920s Boys Love,” she concluded.
In Dracula, Van Helsing has at long last dropped the V word! You know, now that Lucy is dead and it won’t help her at all. Don’t mind me! Just gonna die mad about it!
What I Plan to Read Next
At war with the interlibrary loan office yet again, this time over Mary Renault’s North Face. Wikipedia lists it (inaccurately, as it turns out) as The North Face and I foolishly requested it under that title. Apparently the interlibrary loan office copy-pasted the title into Worldcat and then promptly gave up when it didn’t work, rather than, say, searching “Mary Renault” and making the obvious inference about the titles.
Now I realize that I did give them the wrong title, but also it took me, an untrained amateur, about two minutes to google my way to an answer, so I really feel that they could have managed it!
There are some funny lines. When they first meet, Abe bites into a dill pickle that squirts in Morris’s eye; Morris replies, “S'all right…I seen what you was doing and I should of ordered an umbrella instead of a glass of water already.” But basically it’s a humorous book where a lot of the humor has been lost to the sands of time.
What I’ve Just Finished Reading
Naomi Mitchison’s The Big House, which has a lovely Scottish flavor not only to the dialogue but the narrative, and the way that the sentences are constructed. I’ve seen the book described as a Tam Lin retelling, but it’s not so much a retelling as a fractal remix, and the story gets retold, and retold again, and then again, and each time it’s further from the original but also nonetheless referring back to it.
In traveling in and out of fairyland to help their friend the piper Donald Ferguson, Su and Winkie also travel back and forth through time, so the book is also a meditation on the history of Scotland (not so much the Jacobites as the enclosures), and on the class system of the British Isles, and on the wheel of fortune in the medieval sense: the fact that fortunes rise and fall and a family that is on top of the world one century may be nothing much in another.
The book is a bit of a mess: the pacing is choppy and it doesn’t really all come together. But I admire it for its ambitions even though it doesn’t quite fulfill them.
What I’m Reading Now
D. K. Broster’s The Wounded Name. I started reading this the other day while accompanying a friend shoe-shopping, and she asked what I was reading, and I explained, well, it’s this book from the 1920s… set near the end of the Napoleonic Wars… and our heroes have just met for the very first time, and one of them slipped into the flood-swollen river and the other leaped in after him to save him from drowning…
Kayla considered the matter. “So 1920s Boys Love,” she concluded.
In Dracula, Van Helsing has at long last dropped the V word! You know, now that Lucy is dead and it won’t help her at all. Don’t mind me! Just gonna die mad about it!
What I Plan to Read Next
At war with the interlibrary loan office yet again, this time over Mary Renault’s North Face. Wikipedia lists it (inaccurately, as it turns out) as The North Face and I foolishly requested it under that title. Apparently the interlibrary loan office copy-pasted the title into Worldcat and then promptly gave up when it didn’t work, rather than, say, searching “Mary Renault” and making the obvious inference about the titles.
Now I realize that I did give them the wrong title, but also it took me, an untrained amateur, about two minutes to google my way to an answer, so I really feel that they could have managed it!
