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Wednesday Reading Meme
Dec. 11th, 2024 10:54 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s Gib and the Gray Ghost, sequel to Gib Rides Home, which like many sequels was not quite as good as the first one. In particular I felt she bobbled the ending. But lots of good horse material if you like horse books.
Also John le Carré’s The Honourable Schoolboy, which took me forever to read - not as pacy as many of his other novels. It doesn’t help that this one often slips into a weirdly retrospective style, as in, “Afterwards people said Smiley should have done X, but given the information at the time it’s hard to see how he could have realized…” This could be used to heighten tension, but here I felt the style leached it away.
Also Ethel Cook Eliot’s Ariel Dances. Nineteen-year-old Ariel is the daughter of Gregory Clare, an unknown artist who recently died. His youthful friend Hugh has taken on the responsibility of selling Clare’s canvases, which will, of course, make Ariel’s fortune, but until then Ariel will be staying with Hugh’s family, where she is more or less adopted by Hugh’s semi-mystical grandmother, whom Eliot compares to great-great-grandmother in George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin
Are Ariel and Hugh going to get married? 100%. Is this how the book ends? 100% not. In fact, we end with Hugh’s semi-mystical grandmother triumphantly shuffling off this mortal coil to her next great adventure, Death.
Ethel Cook Eliot is one of those authors where I’m sometimes a bit puzzled why I keep going back to her, and I think part of it is that her writing priorities are often interestingly bizarre, in a way that it didn’t quite come into focus for me until she brought in the George MacDonald comparison. Christian mysticism! But with magic! Except no actual magic in this particular book, but still kind of magic?
What I’m Reading Now
Galloping toward the end of Villette! Lucy has just been accidentally-on-purpose directed to the house where M. Paul pays room and board for his old tutor, his dead fiancee’s mean grandmother, and an old family servant, on the theory that upon seeing how many dependents he’s already supporting Lucy will realize that M. Paul is WAY too broke to marry.
Unfortunately for everyone involved in this plot, what Lucy has in fact realized is “M. Paul is an amazing human being despite also being the most irritating person on earth” and also “People think? that M. Paul wants to marry me? enough that they are actually going out of their way to dissuade me from considering it???? I mean I’m still NOT considering it, that would be PRESUMPTUOUS, if you allow yourself to want anything then fate will strike you down! But still…”
What I Plan to Read Next
Taking a little break from Smiley right now, but will swing back around with Smiley’s People in 2025.
Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s Gib and the Gray Ghost, sequel to Gib Rides Home, which like many sequels was not quite as good as the first one. In particular I felt she bobbled the ending. But lots of good horse material if you like horse books.
Also John le Carré’s The Honourable Schoolboy, which took me forever to read - not as pacy as many of his other novels. It doesn’t help that this one often slips into a weirdly retrospective style, as in, “Afterwards people said Smiley should have done X, but given the information at the time it’s hard to see how he could have realized…” This could be used to heighten tension, but here I felt the style leached it away.
Also Ethel Cook Eliot’s Ariel Dances. Nineteen-year-old Ariel is the daughter of Gregory Clare, an unknown artist who recently died. His youthful friend Hugh has taken on the responsibility of selling Clare’s canvases, which will, of course, make Ariel’s fortune, but until then Ariel will be staying with Hugh’s family, where she is more or less adopted by Hugh’s semi-mystical grandmother, whom Eliot compares to great-great-grandmother in George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin
Are Ariel and Hugh going to get married? 100%. Is this how the book ends? 100% not. In fact, we end with Hugh’s semi-mystical grandmother triumphantly shuffling off this mortal coil to her next great adventure, Death.
Ethel Cook Eliot is one of those authors where I’m sometimes a bit puzzled why I keep going back to her, and I think part of it is that her writing priorities are often interestingly bizarre, in a way that it didn’t quite come into focus for me until she brought in the George MacDonald comparison. Christian mysticism! But with magic! Except no actual magic in this particular book, but still kind of magic?
What I’m Reading Now
Galloping toward the end of Villette! Lucy has just been accidentally-on-purpose directed to the house where M. Paul pays room and board for his old tutor, his dead fiancee’s mean grandmother, and an old family servant, on the theory that upon seeing how many dependents he’s already supporting Lucy will realize that M. Paul is WAY too broke to marry.
Unfortunately for everyone involved in this plot, what Lucy has in fact realized is “M. Paul is an amazing human being despite also being the most irritating person on earth” and also “People think? that M. Paul wants to marry me? enough that they are actually going out of their way to dissuade me from considering it???? I mean I’m still NOT considering it, that would be PRESUMPTUOUS, if you allow yourself to want anything then fate will strike you down! But still…”
What I Plan to Read Next
Taking a little break from Smiley right now, but will swing back around with Smiley’s People in 2025.
