Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I've Finished Reading

Eugenia Ginzburg's Within the Whirldwind, the far-less-harrowing sequel to Journey into the Whirlwind. It's less harrowing both because a good half of the book takes place after Ginzburg's release (being released from the gulags came with its own problems, mind, but it's still better than actually being in a gulag), and also because in the first half of the book, she meets the man who becomes her second husband, whose presence irradiates her life.

I guess love really can bring light to the darkest of places. Or perhaps not the darkest - they meet when Ginzburg becomes a nurse at a gulag tuberculosis hospital, which in gulag terms is a pretty cushy position, although by any ordinary standard it's horrifying - but certainly in places much darker than one might imagine.

What I'm Reading Now

L. M. Montgomery's The Story Girl, which is fun but rather slight. All of her books are pretty clair, but there's often a half-hidden darker edge (not so hidden in the Emily books) which doesn't seem to exist so much in The Story Girl.

I've also just started Sarah Vowell's Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, which is about... well, the Marquis de Lafayette and the American Revolution and the French Revolution and also, possibly, just about revolutions in general, although we'll see how that develops. I enjoy Vowell's work because she has this tendency to bounce all over the place, drawing in things that are perhaps only tangentially related to her main subject but fascinating in their own right.

What I Plan to Read Next

I'm thinking about going on a bit of an L. M. Montgomery binge: the sequel to The Story Girl, The Golden Road, and perhaps also the two Pat books. There are still a few others that I haven't read, but I don't want to go and read them all at once.

Comments

[evelyn-b.livejournal.com]

I can never remember which things happen in The Story Girl and which in The Golden Road, except that The Golden Road has Our Magazine and [spoiler that might not be a spoiler]. Have they gone to visit Peg Bowen yet? Has Doomsday happened?

L. M. Montgomery claimed that The Story Girl was her favorite of her books, and it's easy to see why -- it was easy to write because so much of it had already been written in one form or another, and she was in good spirits generally. It was a fun, low-pressure project after the huge success of the first two Anne books and the unsatisfying ordeal of churning out Kilmeny for a demanding publisher.

The Pat books have a similar structure -- with many, many stories told by Judy Plum between RL incidents. The bulk of them is very cozy for the most part, but with Pat's anxiety always seeping in. They're set in their own present day, rather than a nostalgic past like The Story Girl, but of course they're drenched in pre-emptive nostalgia anyway.

I'm sorry for my inability to shut up about L. M. Montgomery, but obviously not enough to actually ever shut up about L. M. Montgomery. Anyway, I completely approve of this binge, and hope you don't hate Pat too much :(

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

They have visited Peg Bowen! They brought her a whole bunch of presents in hope of pacifying her so she would take the curse off Paddy the cat. Then they all ran away when she came to the door, which made me feel kind of bad for Peg Bowen, because having children run away from you has to be depressing.

Is Kilmeny of the Orchard worth reading, for all that it caused difficulty for the author? The title is so enticing.

I can't promise, of course, but I doubt I will hate Pat. I love Fanny Price, everyone else's least favorite Austen heroine; I have a high tolerance for shy, anxious, uncertain heroines who seem paralyzed by life. I'm also awfully fond of the narrator in Rebecca.

[evelyn-b.livejournal.com]

I'd categorize Kilmeny as "completists only." It's a short story padded out to novella length with nature descriptions, and it shows. The main character, Eric, is not very likable, and comes off as more than a bit of a creep. Kilmeny herself is a curio for Mary Sue connoisseurs, but not much of a character. She's inhumanly beautiful, mysteriously mute, and plays the violin. We're told she engages in long, witty conversations with the aid of a slate, but we are not made privy to the wit. Oh, and she thinks she's ugly, because she's never seen a mirror! Also, there's an Italian orphan boy whom everyone predicts will turn bad because of his swarthy Mediterranean blood, and then he does. >:(

Basically it's a magazine potboiler, only with more words. There's a very slight, melodramatic short-story plot and all the usual humor and observational small-town and character stuff is missing in action. A Montgomery scholar could probably write a paper making it interesting, but I don't think there's any way to make it a good book.

It is really short, though! And some people do like it. But it's not a typical Montgomery book at all, in the sense that everything people usually like most about Montgomery is not there. Except nature descriptions! There are plenty of those. But even the nature descriptions don't have the same heart-piercing nostalgic effect they do in Anne et al., because the characterization in Kilmeny is so different (so much poorer, imo).

I am crossing my fingers that you will like poor Pat! I think her friend Jingle is my favorite of LMM's Sensitive Boychildren, even if things go a little haywire in the end. They have this really understated, delicate friendship in Pat of Silver Bush.