osprey_archer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer) wrote2013-05-15 12:03 am
osprey_archer) wrote2013-05-15 12:03 am
Wednesday Reading Meme
What I’ve Just Finished Reading
No novels since Unspoken. I did finish reading a history about the Beecher sisters - the Beechers of Harriet Beecher Stowe fame - which focuses mainly on Harriet’s little half-sister Isabella, who divided her energies between the suffrage movement and spiritualism. The Beecher family basically had their fingers stuck in every reformist pie in the entire nineteenth century.
Isabella was convinced that the Second Coming of Christ was imminent and when He returned, He would set her up as a ruler of the world called the Comforter. This has convinced most historians that she was utterly loopy, although she retained sufficient grasp on reality not merely to keep this particular delusion to herself - she confided it only to her spirit diary - but also to become a force in the suffrage movement, almost as important as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.
What I’m Reading Now
Still Les Mis. Valjean and Cosette are in a convent! Hugo decided to stop the action for twenty pages to tell us all about the history of the convent for ever and ever, world without end, amen. There is like a paragraph in there that pertains to the bit later where Valjean nearly gets buried alive, so clearly it was necessary.
Actually I am becoming fond of these digressions. I’ve always had a strange fondness for books when the author is like, “Now I am going to stop the action for a chapter and TELL LIKE A TELLING THING,” like that chapter near the beginning of High Wizardry where Duane outlines the life & philosophy of Dairine Callahan. (I don’t think I was supposed to respond, “Dairine, be my new role model!” Oh well.)
Oh, and we’re about to meet Marius! At least theoretically. Although I think we’re going to get fifty pages in which Hugo retells the last fifty years of French political history through the medium of Marius’s antecedents first.
What I Plan to Read Next
Jaclyn Moriarty’s A Corner of White.
No novels since Unspoken. I did finish reading a history about the Beecher sisters - the Beechers of Harriet Beecher Stowe fame - which focuses mainly on Harriet’s little half-sister Isabella, who divided her energies between the suffrage movement and spiritualism. The Beecher family basically had their fingers stuck in every reformist pie in the entire nineteenth century.
Isabella was convinced that the Second Coming of Christ was imminent and when He returned, He would set her up as a ruler of the world called the Comforter. This has convinced most historians that she was utterly loopy, although she retained sufficient grasp on reality not merely to keep this particular delusion to herself - she confided it only to her spirit diary - but also to become a force in the suffrage movement, almost as important as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.
What I’m Reading Now
Still Les Mis. Valjean and Cosette are in a convent! Hugo decided to stop the action for twenty pages to tell us all about the history of the convent for ever and ever, world without end, amen. There is like a paragraph in there that pertains to the bit later where Valjean nearly gets buried alive, so clearly it was necessary.
Actually I am becoming fond of these digressions. I’ve always had a strange fondness for books when the author is like, “Now I am going to stop the action for a chapter and TELL LIKE A TELLING THING,” like that chapter near the beginning of High Wizardry where Duane outlines the life & philosophy of Dairine Callahan. (I don’t think I was supposed to respond, “Dairine, be my new role model!” Oh well.)
Oh, and we’re about to meet Marius! At least theoretically. Although I think we’re going to get fifty pages in which Hugo retells the last fifty years of French political history through the medium of Marius’s antecedents first.
What I Plan to Read Next
Jaclyn Moriarty’s A Corner of White.
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I'll probably be reading it over Memorial Day weekend, because I'll be visiting my parents then and thus will have time to relax and savor.
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