Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I already posted a review of Paradise Now, and nothing since then.

What I’m Reading Now

Louisa May Alcott’s Moods, and I have to say, I can totally see why posterity ignores this book in favor of Little Women and Alcott’s other children’s books. Alcott preferred writing about men (she mentions this numerous times, sometimes within her own books for girls), but most of her guy characters are sooooo booooring in comparison to the girls. (I make an exception for Laurie. He’s practically an honorary Marsh sister anyway.) Moods features a lantern-jawed paragon of manly self-reliance whose name I can’t even recall.

I’m also reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, which I am enjoying very much, insofar as one can enjoy a book that makes one look with distress at the entire contents of one’s refrigerator because most everything in it is the product of our remarkably broken industrial food system. It’s certainly compelling.

I’m not sure about Pollan’s choice to give the plants’ point of view, though. I suppose my resistance to anthropomorphizing plants might be just as much a result of prejudice as the slowly-crumbling resistance of many scientists to admitting that non-human animals have feelings, but... plants. Do they have opinions? Do they make plans? Even if they do, how would we possibly know? Plants are the true alien life form, more utterly unlike us than anything in a science fiction novel, and I’m not sure we can bridge that gap to communicate with them.

What I Plan to Read Next

Paradise Now has reminded me that I’ve long wanted to read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, which was based on his time at the commune at Brook Farm. The only other Hawthorne I’ve read was The Scarlet Letter, for ninth grade English, which did not leave me with a high opinion of Hawthorne, but surely he cannot fail to make a book about Brook Farm charming.

Paradise Now also reminded me that I’ve always intended to read Thomas More’s Utopia, but that is more along the lines of “a book I plan to read sometime in the future” than “a book I plan to read next.”

Comments

[evelyn-b.livejournal.com]

Alcott preferred writing about men (she mentions this numerous times, sometimes within her own books for girls)

I didn't know that! I might not have been paying much attention. Tbh, I don't remember anything about Laurie except that he existed. Meg's husband was a nonentity. Jo's guy might have been a non-nonentity, but I couldn't get any more specific than that.

This may reflect more on me than on Alcott, though.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I think my favorite example of Alcott's crankiness about her career as an author for girls comes at the end of the final book in the Little Women trilogy, where she threatens to send an earthquake to swallow up Plumfield and everyone in it so she will NEVER HAVE TO WRITE ABOUT THEM AGAIN. Oh Alcott.

But I think her female characters are genuinely more vibrant than her male characters; it's not just you. Lots of people can reel off Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, and have intense feelings about the time that Amy burned Jo's book or Beth's tragic demise or what have you. But who remembers the names of the Little Men, let alone has strong feelings about them?

I'm sure some people do, but it's not nearly as common.

[evelyn-b.livejournal.com]

I know the Little Men have their fans because I've encountered them, but yeah. Little Women was far from my favorite book growing up, but I still have strong feelings about the March sisters (and about Alcott's fictional dad being granted an unambiguously heroic excuse for his absence) and I don't even remember the names of those other kids.

she threatens to send an earthquake to swallow up Plumfield and everyone in it so she will NEVER HAVE TO WRITE ABOUT THEM AGAIN.

Hah! Poor successful authors. How can she be sure it's enough, though? ACD threw Sherlock Holmes off a waterfall, but it didn't stick.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I found Dan and Nat in Little Men memorable, but overall I agree that she's better with women and girls.

Re: plants: This may border on OT but I thought you'd want to know that the ashram library had not one, not two, but THREE books which cited a study (methodology not described in detail; may not even exist) proving that houseplants are telepathic.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Dan is the one who eventually murdered a guy, right? IIRC, for pure and noble reasons, but nonetheless it tainted him forever and therefore he could never be with the girl he loved. So I do remember him a bit.

I've heard of studies proving that plants grow better when they're sung to, so who knows with plants, really. Maybe they have rich emotional lives of which we know nothing.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but that came in later. Mostly I recall his hugely slushy relationship with another boy.

This was a study showing that plants get upset at the exact instant that their owners' plane crashed 1000 miles away. Or perhaps I should say "study," "upset," and "exact."

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Hahaha, wow, yeah, that sounds like a deeply questionable study. I'm envisioning nefarious researchers crashing planes of purpose just to see how the poor innocent houseplants reacted. Probably hard to sell the NSF on that one.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

It reminds me of the Charles Fort book which reported the last radio message of the Star Ariel as "Danger like a dagger now! Come quickly! We cannot escape!"

Actual last radio message: "I WAS OVER 30° N AT 9:37 I AM CHANGING FREQUENCY TO MRX."