Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April, with which I was ultimately quite disenchanted. I felt (as I felt when I watched the movie) that the ending is simultaneously too neat - all the young characters carefully paired up - but also leaves the old lady out: even if she didn’t find love, I wanted her to reconnect with her old friend Kate Lumley, or find a son who was thought long ago lost at sea, or something.

Also Paula Byrne’s The Real Jane Austen, which starts each chapter with some object from Austen’s life or her fiction - a family silhouette portrait or a cashmere shawl - and from there ranges out over some aspect of Austen’s life and English society. It reminds me Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s The Age of Homespun, although Byrne lacks Ulrich’s virtuoso ability to start with a basket and end up encompassing the entire history of colonial America without ever losing sight of the basket weaver: Byrne is apt to get a bit lost along the way.

But nonetheless I enjoyed the book very much, because I’m very partial to the method. I have an idea for a book based around an advent calendar, where the object in the advent calendar becomes the nucleus for the chapter each day… I’m not sure quite how to write it; I think the danger (even more than the danger for most Christmas books) would be that it would become too obvious or twee.

I also read Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son, which I found even more engrossing than I expected, and as it’s three things I enjoy very much (a childhood memoir, about a childhood spent among an unusually intense religious sect, set in the Victorian era), I expected to find it pretty engrossing in the first place.

Gosse was the only son of two devout members of the strictly Calvinist Plymouth Brethren sect. His mother wrote exceedingly popular religious pamphlets and his father was a naturalist, and a quite highly regarded one until The Origin of Species came out and the elder Goss rejected it decisively. The younger Gosse is at his best describing this incident: he’s sympathetic to the titanic difficulty this presented his father, who hitherto saw no conflict between his work as a naturalist and his faith in a literal reading of the Bible, and does an excellent job delineating the turn of mind that led his father to ultimately cast his lot with Genesis rather than Darwin.

I would have liked a bit more detail about what the Plymouth Brethren believed, but I suspect that Gosse’s audience when the book was first published in 1907 would have been able to reconstruct a fairly accurate picture based on his allusions, so I can’t really hold that against him.

What I’m Reading Now

Marie Brennan’s The Tropic of Serpents, which alas strikes me as almost as slow to get started as A Natural History of Dragons. However, I very much enjoyed A Natural History of Dragons by the end, so hopefully I’ll have the same experience with The Tropic of Serpents.

What I Plan to Read Next

J. B. Priestly’s The Good Companions, once the library has fetched it for me through the magic of interlibrary loan. Interlibrary loan, where have you been all my life? I think we should consider a torrid affair.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Interlibrary loan is the best. I get literally all my books there, as our town library is (figuratively) the size of a postage stamp.

The book about the Plymouth Brethren sounds neat--how did you hear about it?

I finished Love in the Age of Cholera! Overall, I liked it very much, though there were this or that element that I did *not* like. But many of the things it observed about love--and about aging--felt very very true, and yet they were true without being harsh or depressing, which I appreciated. There was a grace to it that was completely unaffected, completely sincere.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

It's one of the primary sources that Judith Fletcher quotes in Inside the Victorian Home. I also found Molly Hughes' A London Child of the 1870s though Flanders' book, and I still mean to track down Gwen Raverat's Period Piece sometime.

Would you recommend Love in a Time of Cholera, then? It's one of those books that's always been vaguely on my radar, but I haven't tried to read it.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

It's really hard to say. I liked it for its look at all aspects of romantic love--young love, short relationships, long relationships, relationships among older people--and for looking at them through time. It was a very *complete* examination, and, I thought, very compassionate and generous, while at the same time acknowledging human failings. I was interested in the three main characters, who all had things about them that were unlikable, and yet whom I ended up feeling very sympathetic toward and very fond of.

But the central conceit of the story--a jilted lover decides to wait for the woman who rejected him, even though, after dumping him, she goes on to a completely happy marriage--is, on the face of it, kind of unappealing to me, and maybe to you, too. And yet, the book really won me over on that point, too. It's not so much a valorization of dedication to a (seemingly hopeless) love as a record of one man's *particular* case, which is unique. Thematically, it's more about how love endures and how it changes.

The language is beautiful, and the numerous secondary characters (mainly lovers of the one guy) are all treated as worthwhile people, interesting in their own rights. I liked that a lot. But the story is also slow moving. I think it was very good for me, because I could put it down and pick it up, and because of the nature of the story, I wouldn't have forgotten anything--it was all fresh and present. And it was a very good book for me to have read at this time in my life--but you're at a completely different time.

I guess I'd say, unless you feel a desperate curiosity about it, I'd wait. There are many other great books out there, and this one will keep, and there may be a time when it's just right, but unless you feel a real urge to read it, it's probably not now.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Okay. I'll keep it for later, then.

[evelyn-b.livejournal.com]

Father and Son sounds like something I need to read immediately. Unfortunately, that's true of a lot of things.

Get an advent calendar and try it! It can't hurt to try, and if it turns out too twee, you can put it in a drawer for a year to see if it settles down.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

This is the problem with old books. I'm forever discovering new ones because I know so few, but there's only so much time to read!

Maybe the advent calendar thing would be a good project for December. I could write a chapter each day (relatively short chapters), relating to each object in the advent calendar...