osprey_archer: (books)
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What I’ve Just Finished Reading

As well as Rainbow Rowell’s Carry On (which I posted about already), I finished Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches, which I would only recommend if you are for some reason a Louisa May Alcott completist.

Oh, and I read Betsy Birney’s The Seven Wonders of Sassafras Springs, which was cute. Eben reads a book about the Seven Wonders of the World and complains that there’s nothing interesting in his hometown, Sassafras Springs; his father challenges him to find seven wonderful things in the town, and if Eben manages it, he can take a train out to Colorado to visit an aunt.

So it’s a “finding the wonderful in the world all around you” book, and I like those books so I enjoyed it, but there’s nothing particularly special about it: it does what it says on the tin.

What I’m Reading Now

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ Gypsy’s Cousin Joy, which is the sequel to Gypsy Breynton, a children’s book that slightly predates Little Women and is sometimes cited as an inspiration for it, because Gypsy, like Jo, is a delightfully sprightly hoyden of a girl.

And I’ve started Betsy and the Great World, which is about Betsy’s Grand Tour of Europe. (She’s cutting it close: her trip starts in January 1914. And, it occurs to me, she’s planning to stay a whole year...oh dear.) So far, she’s still on the steamer to Genoa, whence she plans to go to Munich, where her sister studied opera.

What I Plan to Read Next

I really should read Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor and Park. It’s been on my reading list ever since I read Fangirl, but somehow I never got around to it…

Oh, and I’m also thinking that maybe I should read a Raymond Chandler novel, because it turns out that I slandered the poor man a few posts ago: it turns out that Raymond Carver is the one who was a wife-beating drunkard who, after he was sober, wrote and published an essay about how his children ruined his life. (You couldn’t just discuss that with your therapist and/or your AA group, Carver? Privately, where your poor benighted children could never hear it? I bet it never even occurred to Carver that maybe he had ruined his children’s lives, too.)

Raymond Chandler, on the other hand, was an as-far-as-I-know-blameless detective fiction writer. My library has The Big Sleep, so I’m thinking about starting there.

Date: 2016-03-23 06:15 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] evelyn-b.livejournal.com
OH MY GOD, ok, that is a real and true relief (not that I can't enjoy books by terrible people, because I do all the time) but I just got The Long Goodbye in at the bookstore and I love it so much already, so I am a little glad you got your Raymonds mixed up.

I haven't read the book, but The Big Sleep is a terrific movie, if a little incomprehensible.

Date: 2016-03-23 06:49 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] osprey-archer.livejournal.com
One of them should have just gone by Ray. It would have saved so much confusion!

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