Wednesday Reading Meme
Dec. 26th, 2018 10:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI’ve had a bad cold (or a mild flu? Hard to tell the difference) since the 21st, so the last few days of the Christmas season passed by in a feverish blur and I never did make the buche de noel because I couldn’t spend that long away from the sanctuary of the blankets. But I did do a lot of reading! So that was nice, I suppose.
I wanted to read the first Mrs. Pollifax book but the library had a horrible copy where the binding swallowed the last word in each line of type, so in that I was defeated. But I’m assuming this is a series where it doesn’t matter too much if you start at the beginning? I could just jump forward till I find a book more graciously bound.
What I’ve Just Finished Reading
Victoria Finlay’s Color: A Natural History of the Palette has been on my reading list for basically as long as I’ve had a written reading list and I FINALLY read it this weekend. Why did I wait so long? This is full of fascinating tidbits about the history of paint, and how people created all sorts of colors in the days before aniline dyes. I particularly enjoyed the bits about how the physical properties of paint affect paintings over time: a lot of Turner’s works, for instance, look very different today than he did when he painted them, because he loved to experiment with new paints and they often faded or reacted oddly with each other over the years.
I finished Remember, Remember! The Selected Stories of Winifred Holtby - my favorite story I think was “Truth Is Not Sober,” in which Truth (drunk off her head, of course) invades the study of a novelist who prides himself on the sober reality of his narrow stories of middle-class life in which nothing much ever really happens, and shows him that the kind of action that he derides as melodramatic is taking place all around him.
But! But! I’ve been saving the best for last. I read Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. Actually I wanted to read Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman, because I readtruepenny’s review and it sounded like exactly the sort of thing I would like (a classic demon lover tale! But they’re both girls!), only the library didn’t have it… but it turns out that The Haunting of Hill House also features an intense female friendship, so that worked out well.
The story starts when Dr. Montague, a paranormal researcher, rents the famously haunted Hill House for the summer. He invites three young assistants to help him: Luke, the vaguely dissolute heir; Theodora, a young woman who once went into an ESP lab on a lark and scored astonishingly high; and Eleanor, our main viewpoint character, whose house was invaded by a poltergeist when she was twelve.
Luke and Theodora are looking for an interesting summer adventure. Eleanor, however, hopes it will open the doorway for a wider escape from her life.
In her review of The Haunting of Hill House (which discusses both the book and the recent Netflix version), Abigail Nussbaum describes Jackson’s book as a story about “women who have been failed by men.” But this strikes me as a reading with little textual support: Eleanor hasn’t been failed by men, but by her mother and her sister, neither of whom loved her and both of whom have tried to squash her independence. And the person who hurts Eleanor most at Hill House is Theodora - not because Theodora is mean, or dislikes her, but in fact precisely because Theodora is her friend. That friendship arouses such extravagant hopes in Eleanor that Theodora can’t possibly live up to them.
There is an erotic tinge to some of their interactions (Theodora touches Eleanor’s hand, and Eleanor, overwhelmed, pulls away), but this is a side note to their relationship, not the core of their problems. The issue is that Eleanor wants far more from Theodora than Theodora is willing to give - not in terms of sex, but in emotional intensity.
By the end of the week she’s telling Theodora that she intends to go home with Theodora when the experiment ends, and Theodora, aghast (as who would not be?) is begging her to reconsider. They’ll write letters, she promises. They’ll visit each other. They’ll have that picnic by the creek that they’ve been talking about.
These are quite generous promises to make to someone she’s known less than a week, but to Eleanor it feels unendurably cruel to be fobbed off like this. She’s been alone and lonely for so long that trying to solace herself with the normal intensity of friendship is like trying to warm up with a single candle flame while freezing to death.
There’s also an almost-love triangle with the young man in the party, Luke, but he’s never really important: the one time that Eleanor is alone with him, she notes how dull she finds him. She’s looking for, half-hoping for perhaps?, a love triangle because at least that would be more vital emotional warmth - but also because she’s hoping for a definite sign from either one of them (preferably Theodora but she wouldn’t mind if it was Luke) that they like her best, she’s the favorite. But instead they’re both indiscriminately friendly.
(One of the most chilling scene in the story is a sequence with no supernatural elements at all - when Eleanor sneaks around the house, eavesdropping on conversations, hoping to hear someone discuss her - and finds that no one is talking about her at all.)
Hill House, on the other hand, wants her. True, it’s an evil house and it wants to destroy her (insofar as we can know anything about what the house wants; it remains mostly opaque) - but it wants her as fiercely as she needs to be wanted. And once you understand that, the ending becomes inevitable.
What I’m Reading Now
Still working away at Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits. Will hopefully have more to say about it once I’m done reading it?
I’ve also begun Helen Dawes Brown Two College Girls, which is one of the earliest women’s college novels - published in 1886 - and moderately interesting so far, although I’m still only a few chapters in.
What I Plan to Read Next
I have hopes for Shirley Jackson’s Life among the Savages, her humorous memoirs about raising her children. This book sounds about as different as it possible to be from the likes of The Haunting of Hill House and I am fascinated by the contrast.
I wanted to read the first Mrs. Pollifax book but the library had a horrible copy where the binding swallowed the last word in each line of type, so in that I was defeated. But I’m assuming this is a series where it doesn’t matter too much if you start at the beginning? I could just jump forward till I find a book more graciously bound.
What I’ve Just Finished Reading
Victoria Finlay’s Color: A Natural History of the Palette has been on my reading list for basically as long as I’ve had a written reading list and I FINALLY read it this weekend. Why did I wait so long? This is full of fascinating tidbits about the history of paint, and how people created all sorts of colors in the days before aniline dyes. I particularly enjoyed the bits about how the physical properties of paint affect paintings over time: a lot of Turner’s works, for instance, look very different today than he did when he painted them, because he loved to experiment with new paints and they often faded or reacted oddly with each other over the years.
I finished Remember, Remember! The Selected Stories of Winifred Holtby - my favorite story I think was “Truth Is Not Sober,” in which Truth (drunk off her head, of course) invades the study of a novelist who prides himself on the sober reality of his narrow stories of middle-class life in which nothing much ever really happens, and shows him that the kind of action that he derides as melodramatic is taking place all around him.
But! But! I’ve been saving the best for last. I read Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. Actually I wanted to read Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman, because I read
truepenny’s review and it sounded like exactly the sort of thing I would like (a classic demon lover tale! But they’re both girls!), only the library didn’t have it… but it turns out that The Haunting of Hill House also features an intense female friendship, so that worked out well.The story starts when Dr. Montague, a paranormal researcher, rents the famously haunted Hill House for the summer. He invites three young assistants to help him: Luke, the vaguely dissolute heir; Theodora, a young woman who once went into an ESP lab on a lark and scored astonishingly high; and Eleanor, our main viewpoint character, whose house was invaded by a poltergeist when she was twelve.
Luke and Theodora are looking for an interesting summer adventure. Eleanor, however, hopes it will open the doorway for a wider escape from her life.
In her review of The Haunting of Hill House (which discusses both the book and the recent Netflix version), Abigail Nussbaum describes Jackson’s book as a story about “women who have been failed by men.” But this strikes me as a reading with little textual support: Eleanor hasn’t been failed by men, but by her mother and her sister, neither of whom loved her and both of whom have tried to squash her independence. And the person who hurts Eleanor most at Hill House is Theodora - not because Theodora is mean, or dislikes her, but in fact precisely because Theodora is her friend. That friendship arouses such extravagant hopes in Eleanor that Theodora can’t possibly live up to them.
There is an erotic tinge to some of their interactions (Theodora touches Eleanor’s hand, and Eleanor, overwhelmed, pulls away), but this is a side note to their relationship, not the core of their problems. The issue is that Eleanor wants far more from Theodora than Theodora is willing to give - not in terms of sex, but in emotional intensity.
By the end of the week she’s telling Theodora that she intends to go home with Theodora when the experiment ends, and Theodora, aghast (as who would not be?) is begging her to reconsider. They’ll write letters, she promises. They’ll visit each other. They’ll have that picnic by the creek that they’ve been talking about.
These are quite generous promises to make to someone she’s known less than a week, but to Eleanor it feels unendurably cruel to be fobbed off like this. She’s been alone and lonely for so long that trying to solace herself with the normal intensity of friendship is like trying to warm up with a single candle flame while freezing to death.
There’s also an almost-love triangle with the young man in the party, Luke, but he’s never really important: the one time that Eleanor is alone with him, she notes how dull she finds him. She’s looking for, half-hoping for perhaps?, a love triangle because at least that would be more vital emotional warmth - but also because she’s hoping for a definite sign from either one of them (preferably Theodora but she wouldn’t mind if it was Luke) that they like her best, she’s the favorite. But instead they’re both indiscriminately friendly.
(One of the most chilling scene in the story is a sequence with no supernatural elements at all - when Eleanor sneaks around the house, eavesdropping on conversations, hoping to hear someone discuss her - and finds that no one is talking about her at all.)
Hill House, on the other hand, wants her. True, it’s an evil house and it wants to destroy her (insofar as we can know anything about what the house wants; it remains mostly opaque) - but it wants her as fiercely as she needs to be wanted. And once you understand that, the ending becomes inevitable.
What I’m Reading Now
Still working away at Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits. Will hopefully have more to say about it once I’m done reading it?
I’ve also begun Helen Dawes Brown Two College Girls, which is one of the earliest women’s college novels - published in 1886 - and moderately interesting so far, although I’m still only a few chapters in.
What I Plan to Read Next
I have hopes for Shirley Jackson’s Life among the Savages, her humorous memoirs about raising her children. This book sounds about as different as it possible to be from the likes of The Haunting of Hill House and I am fascinated by the contrast.
