Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Another L. M. Montgomery! This time, it’s Jane of Lantern Hill, which I quite enjoyed: you have a deliciously grim old house in Toronto (delicious for the reader; Jane of course does not enjoy it), you have the gorgeous Prince Edward Island scenery, you have Jane’s Adventures in Housekeeping, which are a lot of fun although admittedly not as memorable as Anne’s liniment cake. But then you can’t have everything.

And you don’t get the same feeling that Montgomery was disgorging the contents of her writing notebooks into Jane of Lantern Hill as in Pat of Silver Bush: the story moves on at a good clip without frequent pauses for “Let me tell you this story about the time someone did something quirky fifty years ago…”

Also Paula McLain’s Love and Ruin, in which Ernest Hemingway is a total manbaby who marries war correspondent Martha Gellhorn because he falls in love with her independence and sense of adventure, and then is baffled - baffled! - that she doesn’t want to settle down and keep the homefires burning while Ernest goes off and has the adventures. What can this mean??? How can she be so selfish? Why does she insist on continuing to display the same character traits she has had for their entire acquaintance when it would be so much more convenient for Ernest if she changed??? WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS, HEMINGWAY.

This is a rhetorical question because I am pretty sure that people have filled entire tomes on the topic of Hemingway without ever figuring out why he is like this. But honestly. The impression I got in Love and Ruin, at least, is that he wants total unconditional love, when in fact love between adults is almost always conditional AND FOR GOOD REASON, because if you discover your beloved is a Nazi or a serial killer or just Ernest Hemingway, the Man Who Viciously Belittles His Wife to Blow Off Steam, you need an escape hatch.

Side note: I have noticed that the more ferociously someone insists on receiving unconditional love, the more conditional the love they offer generally is. “You have to love me WITHOUT CONDITIONS” is a pretty enormous condition all on its own, honestly.

What I’m Reading Now

Shannon Hale’s Princess Academy. I really enjoyed Hale’s Austenland and felt really meh about all the rest of her books that I’ve read, and Princess Academy is definitely leaning toward the meh category right now.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve finally put a hold on Tamora Pierce’s Tempests and Slaughter. Should I also get Battle Magic, which is the other book of hers that I haven’t read? Oh, but I only ever read the first book of the Terrier series, so maybe I should get those too… Gosh, I’ve really fallen behind, haven’t I?

Comments

[ladyherenya]

I liked both Tempests and Slaughter and Battle Magic more than I was expecting to. My feelings about the second and third Beka books are complicated -- they were not what I was expecting and I was disappointed about it.

[osprey_archer]

Tempests and Slaughter is the first book of duology, right? (Or maybe trilogy?) Does it end on a total cliffhanger or is there some resolution?

[ladyherenya]

I suspect it's a trilogy, just from how much of Arram's childhood/adolescence is covered in the first book. It doesn't have a cliffhanger ending. Its level of resolution is similar to Pierce's other books, I think.

[asakiyume]

The fact that "you must love me unconditionally" is a huge condition made me smile.

But in the case of not understanding why his wife didn't change, I think this has to do with not hiring the person for the job, so to speak. He had a sense of what the job of wife was. For that job--as he (and many others) conceived it--he shouldn't have hired someone whom he loved as a companion and intellectual equal, etc. He should have hired someone who was attractive enough for him to sleep with, who would cook him meals and bring up his children. Either that or... he needed to change the job description for "wife." In other words, his job description for "wife" was "good-natured drudge who idolizes me, will sleep with me, and will bring up my children--will also act as my event planner, occasional secretary, and cheering squad." For that job, the woman he loved was inappropriate. His choice about which to change, the role or the person for the role, but he couldn't have both.

[osprey_archer]

By the time Hemingway married Martha Gellhorn, he had already gone through two wives who more or less fit that job description - maybe not perfectly (but then who is perfect?) but certainly better than Martha did. You wonder if he was beginning to see the limitations of this job description but thought that "changing the job description" meant "piling more desirable attributes on top while keeping all of the old ones, too."

Or maybe he was just fickle and didn't think things through. Or maybe he felt that if he could just find the right wife, the perfect wife, he would be happy forever, so he kept moving from wife to wife without realizing that there wasn't a woman in the world big enough to contain all of his unhappiness.

[kore]

Side note: I have noticed that the more ferociously someone insists on receiving unconditional love, the more conditional the love they offer generally is. “You have to love me WITHOUT CONDITIONS” is a pretty enormous condition all on its own, honestly.

INDEED.

[osprey_archer]

And if anyone ever says that, you have to worry what conditions they're afraid you'll set. Just how badly are you agreeing to be treated if you say, "Yes yes, I'll love you no matter what you do!"?

[brigdh]

Side note: I have noticed that the more ferociously someone insists on receiving unconditional love, the more conditional the love they offer generally is. “You have to love me WITHOUT CONDITIONS” is a pretty enormous condition all on its own, honestly.

AGREED. Even regarding family rather than romantic love, I worry a little about people who loudly proclaim that loyalty matters over everything else. I love my dad dearly, but if evidence suddenly emerged that he'd been a serial killer for years, I wouldn't help him escape the police.

[osprey_archer]

I think loyalty is pretty important, but all the same there are times when it needs to give. Setting it aside may destroy the relationship, but then again if the other party in that relationship is secretly a serial killer, that's probably just as well, now isn't it?