osprey_archer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer) wrote2015-11-11 08:09 am
osprey_archer) wrote2015-11-11 08:09 am
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Wednesday Reading Meme
What I’ve Just Finished Reading
A. R. Luria’s The Making of Mind, which is an interesting account of Luria’s various psychological experiments (I found the one comparing the descriptions of geometrical figures given by illiterate peasants and literate townsfolk particularly interesting), but frustrating short on any personal details. And by frustratingly short, I mean that the personal details are so emphatically absent that the copy I read had an afterward by the translator wherein he gives a capsule summary of Luria’s life, because otherwise the reader wouldn’t know such basic facts as, say, whether Luria was married.
It’s a very different approach to autobiography than the one that I’m used to. It’s an interesting book as a snapshot of psychology, but not worth reading if you’re hoping to glean any background details about the early Soviet Union.
What I’m Reading Now
I started Andy Weir’s The Martian, but then I got ambushed by Cara Nicoletti’s Voracious: A Hungry Reader Cooks Her Way through Great Books, which is essentially a series of vignettes (each accompanied by a recipe) about food in great literature. There is, say, a chapter about bread in Les Miserables, Mary Lenox’s relationship to food in The Secret Garden, and those unforgettable meals in The Boxcar Children.
It’s interesting - and almost all of the recipes sound like food I would actually enjoy eating, which is unusual in food books (I’m particularly attracted to the Gingerbread Cake with Blood Orange Syrup recipe in the chapter about Hansel and Gretel) - but I think the chapters would benefit from being a bit longer, with a higher ratio of literary analysis to personal recollection.
I also think that someone needed to proofread this book a bit better, or indeed at all. The copy-editing is fine, but in the very first chapter Nicoletti refers to Laura’s father in the Little House series as “Pa Wilder.” Ingalls! Laura’s maiden name is Ingalls! This is only stated approximately fifty times in every single book in the entire series!
She also claims that Les Miserables “mostly takes place in 1815, just fifteen years after Marie Antoinette reportedly declared ‘Let them eat cake’ upon hearing the peasants had no bread to eat,” which packs a lot of wrongness into one sentence. Only a very small part of Les Miserables takes place in 1815, and even if the whole damn book took place then, you could not call that “fifteen years” after Marie Antoinette made her unfortunate alleged cake statement, because that was an inciting rumor at the beginning of the Revolution, which started in 1789.
It rather undermines my confidence with Nicoletti starts writing about books that I’m not familiar with. What basic facts might she be getting wrong about The Bell Jar ot The Hours?
But the food descriptions make me very hungry, so there is that.
What I Plan to Read Next
I’m going to finish The Martian. I also have L. M. Montgomery’s The Golden Road and Marie Brennan’s Voyage of the Basilisk, the library having come through in spades on my holds, so I’m rather spoiled for choice.
A. R. Luria’s The Making of Mind, which is an interesting account of Luria’s various psychological experiments (I found the one comparing the descriptions of geometrical figures given by illiterate peasants and literate townsfolk particularly interesting), but frustrating short on any personal details. And by frustratingly short, I mean that the personal details are so emphatically absent that the copy I read had an afterward by the translator wherein he gives a capsule summary of Luria’s life, because otherwise the reader wouldn’t know such basic facts as, say, whether Luria was married.
It’s a very different approach to autobiography than the one that I’m used to. It’s an interesting book as a snapshot of psychology, but not worth reading if you’re hoping to glean any background details about the early Soviet Union.
What I’m Reading Now
I started Andy Weir’s The Martian, but then I got ambushed by Cara Nicoletti’s Voracious: A Hungry Reader Cooks Her Way through Great Books, which is essentially a series of vignettes (each accompanied by a recipe) about food in great literature. There is, say, a chapter about bread in Les Miserables, Mary Lenox’s relationship to food in The Secret Garden, and those unforgettable meals in The Boxcar Children.
It’s interesting - and almost all of the recipes sound like food I would actually enjoy eating, which is unusual in food books (I’m particularly attracted to the Gingerbread Cake with Blood Orange Syrup recipe in the chapter about Hansel and Gretel) - but I think the chapters would benefit from being a bit longer, with a higher ratio of literary analysis to personal recollection.
I also think that someone needed to proofread this book a bit better, or indeed at all. The copy-editing is fine, but in the very first chapter Nicoletti refers to Laura’s father in the Little House series as “Pa Wilder.” Ingalls! Laura’s maiden name is Ingalls! This is only stated approximately fifty times in every single book in the entire series!
She also claims that Les Miserables “mostly takes place in 1815, just fifteen years after Marie Antoinette reportedly declared ‘Let them eat cake’ upon hearing the peasants had no bread to eat,” which packs a lot of wrongness into one sentence. Only a very small part of Les Miserables takes place in 1815, and even if the whole damn book took place then, you could not call that “fifteen years” after Marie Antoinette made her unfortunate alleged cake statement, because that was an inciting rumor at the beginning of the Revolution, which started in 1789.
It rather undermines my confidence with Nicoletti starts writing about books that I’m not familiar with. What basic facts might she be getting wrong about The Bell Jar ot The Hours?
But the food descriptions make me very hungry, so there is that.
What I Plan to Read Next
I’m going to finish The Martian. I also have L. M. Montgomery’s The Golden Road and Marie Brennan’s Voyage of the Basilisk, the library having come through in spades on my holds, so I’m rather spoiled for choice.
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Mary Lenox’s relationship to food in The Secret Garden - I always thought of her as the sort of person who wasn't interested in food, or only in the case of sustenance, certainly nothing to do with taste, variety, cooking. More like fuel, rather than something to enjoy.
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But I think A Little Princess probably would have been a better Burnett book for food, because food is all over that book. Sara's quest to find good food for Becky, the food at Sara's tragic birthday party, the buns that Sara buys with a fourpence she buys in the street... and of course the two feasts at the end.
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Shame though, that book sounds like it could have been really kind of interesting.
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Looking forward to your review of The Martian.
I'm reading for book group Life after Life, in which the protagonist's life ends at many different points (from right at birth on up). The story starts anew each time she dies, and as she gets older, she has presentments, I guess you could say, about her death in other timelines, and so can take corrective actions, instinctively.
That seems to be the point: to show how life could be different with different decisions (of course it doesn't all come down to conscious decisions, or one's own decisions--other people's decisions, which also change in different timelines, also have an effect). I suppose it's a chance to look into many possible universes. ... I like the idea; I'm not sure yet how I feel about the execution.
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The Life after Life book sounds vaguely reminiscent of the Jo Walton book My Real Children, which I found very frustrating. It is an interesting concept, but I'm not sure what kind of execution I actually would find satisfying.
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