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'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.