Wednesday Reading Meme
Nov. 11th, 2015 08:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat 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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Date: 2015-11-15 03:04 pm (UTC)