Wednesday Reading Meme
Aug. 8th, 2018 08:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Jim and Jamie Dutcher’s The Wisdom of Wolves: Lessons from the Sawtooth Pack, which is engrossing (I read it in one day) although I did have some questions about the validity of some of the observations. The Dutchers made a documentary about a wolf pack formed from wolf pups they had raised by hand, which meant that they could get much closer to the wolves than researchers can get to a wild pack - which enabled them, for example, to record a far wider range of vocalizations than most researchers, who aren’t close enough to hear more than the howls.
But I do wonder how representative of wolf vocalization these sounds were. Pups raised by humans wouldn’t have older wolves to teach them how to ‘talk,’ as it were. Were the Sawtooth pack vocalizations typical, or were they basically speaking wolf pidgin?
Also Susan Hermann Loomis’s In a French Kitchen: Tales and Traditions of Everyday Home cooking in France, which is a food memoir/recipe book (but mostly memoir) about cooking in France, with plenty of stories and tips from Loomis’s French friends. A pleasant, charming example of the genre if you’re into food memoirs. Plus I found a few recipes that look both delicious and easy enough to be worth trying, a combination that happens in fewer cookbooks than you might expect.
What I’m Reading Now
Onward in My Brilliant Career! Sybylla has her doubts about Harold Beecham’s suitability as a suitor - does the man have a spark of true emotion in him? But she begins to warm to him when he flies into a rage after she allows another man to carve his initials with hers on a gum tree. Harold grabs her by the arm and shoulders and shakes her. Later, Sybilla “laughed a joyous little laugh, saying, ‘Hal, we are quits,’ when, on disrobing for the night, I discovered on my soft white shoulders and arms — so susceptible to bruises — many marks, and black.
It had been a very happy day for me.” (204)
Nothing says “I love you” like copious bruising!
I’ve also started reading Eliza Orne White’s When Molly Was Six, and have discovered that each chapter is a month of the year. This seems like a delightful way to organize a book and now I want to write one like that, although the heroine would probably be older than six.
And one of my friends lent me Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation, which I have been reading with interest, although also occasional argument: I think Traister oversells the joys of living alone, in a way that makes it seem like your only options in this life are marriage or living alone foreverty-ever (or perhaps living with a romantic partner without marriage). What about singles who live with roommates or friends or join a commune or, hell, even live with their parents?
You know what we need? A thoughtful, nonjudgmental book about young adults who still live with their parents. Does that exist? I feel that this is a demographic shift that we’ve mostly ignored in the hopes that it will go away because we’ve decided it’s embarrassing, even though adult-children-living-with-their-parents is actually an extremely common pattern throughout human history, and occurs in the animal kingdom, too. Not all wolves wander off to find mates! Some of them just stay home and help their natal pack!
BUT ANYWAY. I’m not sure how much this is a genuine weakness in the book, and how much of it is just that I personally would have preferred All the Single Ladies Band Together to Try Out New Family Structures: Chapter 3 Is about a Goat-Farming Commune.
What I Plan to Read Next
I may need to come up with a backup plan in case the library doesn’t get me Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s Eyes in the Fishbowl in time for my August challenge.
Jim and Jamie Dutcher’s The Wisdom of Wolves: Lessons from the Sawtooth Pack, which is engrossing (I read it in one day) although I did have some questions about the validity of some of the observations. The Dutchers made a documentary about a wolf pack formed from wolf pups they had raised by hand, which meant that they could get much closer to the wolves than researchers can get to a wild pack - which enabled them, for example, to record a far wider range of vocalizations than most researchers, who aren’t close enough to hear more than the howls.
But I do wonder how representative of wolf vocalization these sounds were. Pups raised by humans wouldn’t have older wolves to teach them how to ‘talk,’ as it were. Were the Sawtooth pack vocalizations typical, or were they basically speaking wolf pidgin?
Also Susan Hermann Loomis’s In a French Kitchen: Tales and Traditions of Everyday Home cooking in France, which is a food memoir/recipe book (but mostly memoir) about cooking in France, with plenty of stories and tips from Loomis’s French friends. A pleasant, charming example of the genre if you’re into food memoirs. Plus I found a few recipes that look both delicious and easy enough to be worth trying, a combination that happens in fewer cookbooks than you might expect.
What I’m Reading Now
Onward in My Brilliant Career! Sybylla has her doubts about Harold Beecham’s suitability as a suitor - does the man have a spark of true emotion in him? But she begins to warm to him when he flies into a rage after she allows another man to carve his initials with hers on a gum tree. Harold grabs her by the arm and shoulders and shakes her. Later, Sybilla “laughed a joyous little laugh, saying, ‘Hal, we are quits,’ when, on disrobing for the night, I discovered on my soft white shoulders and arms — so susceptible to bruises — many marks, and black.
It had been a very happy day for me.” (204)
Nothing says “I love you” like copious bruising!
I’ve also started reading Eliza Orne White’s When Molly Was Six, and have discovered that each chapter is a month of the year. This seems like a delightful way to organize a book and now I want to write one like that, although the heroine would probably be older than six.
And one of my friends lent me Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation, which I have been reading with interest, although also occasional argument: I think Traister oversells the joys of living alone, in a way that makes it seem like your only options in this life are marriage or living alone foreverty-ever (or perhaps living with a romantic partner without marriage). What about singles who live with roommates or friends or join a commune or, hell, even live with their parents?
You know what we need? A thoughtful, nonjudgmental book about young adults who still live with their parents. Does that exist? I feel that this is a demographic shift that we’ve mostly ignored in the hopes that it will go away because we’ve decided it’s embarrassing, even though adult-children-living-with-their-parents is actually an extremely common pattern throughout human history, and occurs in the animal kingdom, too. Not all wolves wander off to find mates! Some of them just stay home and help their natal pack!
BUT ANYWAY. I’m not sure how much this is a genuine weakness in the book, and how much of it is just that I personally would have preferred All the Single Ladies Band Together to Try Out New Family Structures: Chapter 3 Is about a Goat-Farming Commune.
What I Plan to Read Next
I may need to come up with a backup plan in case the library doesn’t get me Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s Eyes in the Fishbowl in time for my August challenge.
