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.

[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.

[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!)