Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I already posted about Miss Pym Disposes, and that’s the only one.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve started reading Eva Ibbotson’s The Star of Kazan as my new bedtime book, and her work is so perfectly adapted for this purpose that I am almost sorry that I’ve already read almost all of her books. They’re comforting and homey and full of lovely food descriptions and lovable characters, but also plotty enough that I’m always excited to read the next couple of chapters each night.

I’m also reading Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Fair Barbarian, which is about an American girl who travels to visit her aunt in a poky English town (named Slowborough - I love these delightfully fitting names) and shakes the place up a bit. So far she has befriended the shy (but slyly humorous!) granddaughter of the cranky local dowager, inveigled the befuddled curate into a game of croquet, and stunned the whole town with her audacity in standing alone on a moonlit terrace with a man.

I’m enjoying it a lot. It’s free on Kindle if anyone wants to give it a whirl.

What I Plan to Read Next

I was going to read Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species for my reading challenge “a book I should have read in school”... only I started reading it and I got totally bored, so I’ve decided not to do that after all.

So! Now I need another book that I should have read in school. I was thinking briefly “Perhaps this is my opportunity to expand my grasp of French literature!”, but then I realized that there is no school in the US that would assign Zola’s Nana, so maybe not.

Comments

[evelyn-b.livejournal.com]

Aw, read Nana anyway if you want to! "Should" is a word with many meanings.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I want to read something that's at least vaguely within the spirit of the challenge, though!

Maybe I should read All Quiet on the Western Front. I've heard about this book for years without ever getting more than a vague sense what it's about, and also that it's the kind of book someone has read for high school somewhere.

[evelyn-b.livejournal.com]

Oh, maybe! I haven't read that one since I was actually in high school.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

I don't think many schools assign "On the Origin of Species" these days anyway. Enough time has passed that it's more an object of historical interest than useful science. A friend of mine had the same impulse – I study evolution, I should read Darwin! – a few years ago, and also quickly abandoned it. Poor Darwin! You had a great title, at least.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I've read that he is actually quite entertaining for a nineteenth-century science writer, which probably ought to have tipped me off that he probably isn't really that entertaining. Or maybe he gets more entertaining if you get to the part where he talks about barnacles? In any case, I was not entertained.

[thisbluespirit]

The Star of Kazan is my favourite of Eva Ibbotson's books that aren't (as they obviously should all be) about ghosts and witches (I am forever saddened that she left behind the days of Which Witch? and The Great Ghost Rescue). It is obviously such a love song to Vienna, I think - and that chimes in with my eternally Chalet School loving soul.

I very much enjoyed Journey to the River Sea too; the other one probably a little less so. Her adult novels in the same vein are pure comfort reading & I've read a few of those as well, although I always find by the end, or at least somewhere about 200+ pages in, a little too sweet for me. (The children's ones seem to rein it in a bit, or maybe it's just the shorter length or lack of a love story that make them feel a little more grounded and less everybody glowing with sheer goodness, sweetness and talent until I feel the desperate need for a tiny bit of salt to leaven out all the sugar, I don't know. Very nice bedtime reading, indeed, though!)

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

All of Ibboton's books make me homesick for Vienna, never mind I've never been there. It seems like a fairyland in itself in her stories.

I've tended to prefer Ibbotson's adult books, although admittedly I haven't read too many of her children's stories; I loved The Secret of Platform 13 but at the same time found it a little too goofy.

But perhaps I should read the others, you know, in the spirit of inquiry. Clearly I cannot make definitive statements on Ibbotson until I have read every book in her oeuvre!

[thisbluespirit]

I speak as the unbiased person who loved Which Witch? and The Great Ghost Rescue and The Haunting of Hiram C. Hopgood aged 10 or so, of course. ;-) Her adult style was something of a shock, although slightly less so because I at least read them after Journey to the River Sea, so I could see the link & now I can see it even in the other stuff. But I do think it's a shame she couldn't have merged some of the two here and there, because I enjoyed her comic approach to the supernatural! (Her ghosts and Dark Lords tend to be terribly sensible about it all, which always charms me.) They must be all about 30 years old now, and I don't know how well they've dated - but I should think they're still enjoyable!

I don't think I've read all her adult books yet, either, but... most of them? I don't know.