Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

I've finally cracked and decided to do the Wednesday Reading Meme all the cool kids are doing, because I feel like I don't post about books much anymore and it makes me sad. :(

Of course this is partly because most of my reading these days is for class, and really, none of you want to hear endless mournful plaints about how sometimes reading postcolonial theory reminds me of reading Chuang Tzu, way back in freshman studies. The writing in both is impenetrable (though in completely different ways) and possibly they're trying to teach a similar lesson about the unknowableness of things.

But at least Chuang Tzu has parables about, like, frogs and butterflies.

What I Just Finished Reading

Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, which is...surprisingly awesome! If we had read this in American Lit in high school rather than Hawthorne and Twain, maybe I wouldn't have such deeply ingrained anti-American literature feelings in my heart.

I liked it so much that I'm going to write my eight-page paper about identity about it, focusing on the sentimentalist vision of individual sympathy overcoming preexisting loyalties/identities, like, say, "law-abiding American citizen who doesn't help escaped slaves."

What I'm Reading Now

I'm working on Edwin Arlington Robinson's Merlin, which is a book-length poem about...Merlin and Vivian and the end of Camelot? I don't even know. I thought it might be useful for my project about World War I stuff, but if it's saying anything about World War I it's awfully oblique about it.

But! More fun! I'm also reading Sherwood Smith's Danse de la Folie, a Regency romance. The first couple of chapters were set-up and thus a little dull, but once the heroines meet everything begins to gallop forward. Sensible, thoughtful Clarissa is fun (though I'm kind of sorry she's being set up with the staid Marquess rather than his younger brother Ned), and I <3 <3 <3 giddy romantic "I want to write a novel! With Greek banditti who speak the Greek of Thucydides!" Kitty.

We haven't met her hero yet and I hope he is ridiculously romantic. Like, maybe a French spy romantic. A French spy who reads Thucydides!

What I'm Reading Next

I need to read George DuMaurier's Trilby, which is about artists and bohemia and France (yay!) and also apparently dives into a pit of anti-Semitism halfway through (boo!). And also Hawthorne's The Marble Faun, but I'm putting that off until after spring break because Hawthorne. Also maybe Pamela Dean's Tam Lin? We'll see how next week pans out.

Comments

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

It's a fun one!