Wednesday Reading Meme
Mar. 13th, 2019 09:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Lee Israel’s Can You Ever Forgive Me?: Memoirs of a Literary Forger, which I put on hold months ago (after I saw the movie) but leapt on with as much enthusiasm as if I’d only requested it yesterday. A great companion piece to the movie: the movie fleshes out Israel’s character a bit more, but the book has more salty literary gossip (some of it forged, of course, although Israel did try to make her forgeries accord with the their subjects’ known opinions).
Israel has a particular affinity for snarky gossip about celebrities - probably in part because this sells well to letter dealers, but also perhaps because she seems pretty snarky herself. I particularly enjoyed the joke about the the actress who married Cary Grant and then divorced him, because “she got tired of sleeping in the middle - with Randolph Scott on the other side.”
I also read Liudmilla Pertrushevskaya’s The Girl from the Metropole Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia more or less instantly upon learning of its existence. It’s a childhood memoir (already one of my favorite genres) about growing up in the Soviet Union during World War II as part of an Old Bolshevik family that had lost most of its status during the Great Purge of 1937, when many family members were arrested. She was born in the Metropole Hotel but within the first five years of her life descended to such poverty that she stole food out of the more prosperous neighbors’ trash, and one night remained mesmerized by the trash can at the sight of the neighbor girls’ carelessly discarded dolls.
This may make it sound like a grim morass of misery, but it isn’t at all. There’s a sort of fairy tale feel to the book that gives a sense of remove from the events; after all, Petrushevskaya is a writer of a fairy tales, and co-wrote the animated film Tale of Tales. Her memoir is a series of vignettes that dance lightly between bedbugs and attempted gang rapes and the magical night that she snuck into the opera and watched, spellbound, from the rafters.
I also finished Shirley Jackson’s Raising Demons, which has only made me want to read the recent Jackson biography more for purposes of comparison, but I really think I’ll get more out of it if I finish reading at least her novels first (I’m not holding out to finish all the short stories). I’ve still got The Road Through the Wall, The Bird’s Nest, and The Sundial.
What I’m Reading Now
Frans de Waal’s Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, which is less deliciously snarky the Carl Safina’s Beyond Words but just as chock full of wonderful anecdotes - not only about animal behavior, but about the major players in the animal intelligence debates in the twentieth century, many of whom de Waal knew personally. My favorite story so far is the part where B. F. Skinner and his colleagues try to take over a primate facility to make it into an operant conditioning laboratory, which involved cutting the chimpanzees’ food to starvation rations, only Skinner was foiled (rumor has it) because the staff kept feeding the chimpanzees on the sly at night because they felt so bad for them.
The more I read about B. F. Skinner the more disturbing he seems.
I’ve also begun Willa Cather’s My Antonia, although I’m not far enough in to have anything more in depth to say than that Cather is awfully good at describing prairies. I’m not usually much for lengthy nature description, but she makes it so clear that you can see it.
What I Plan to Read Next
One of my classmates from college published a book, The Far Field, and I thought it would be nice to read it because I knew her slightly… and then it occurred to me that the book would also fit my reading challenge for “a book outside your (genre) comfort zone,” so it’s happening.
Lee Israel’s Can You Ever Forgive Me?: Memoirs of a Literary Forger, which I put on hold months ago (after I saw the movie) but leapt on with as much enthusiasm as if I’d only requested it yesterday. A great companion piece to the movie: the movie fleshes out Israel’s character a bit more, but the book has more salty literary gossip (some of it forged, of course, although Israel did try to make her forgeries accord with the their subjects’ known opinions).
Israel has a particular affinity for snarky gossip about celebrities - probably in part because this sells well to letter dealers, but also perhaps because she seems pretty snarky herself. I particularly enjoyed the joke about the the actress who married Cary Grant and then divorced him, because “she got tired of sleeping in the middle - with Randolph Scott on the other side.”
I also read Liudmilla Pertrushevskaya’s The Girl from the Metropole Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia more or less instantly upon learning of its existence. It’s a childhood memoir (already one of my favorite genres) about growing up in the Soviet Union during World War II as part of an Old Bolshevik family that had lost most of its status during the Great Purge of 1937, when many family members were arrested. She was born in the Metropole Hotel but within the first five years of her life descended to such poverty that she stole food out of the more prosperous neighbors’ trash, and one night remained mesmerized by the trash can at the sight of the neighbor girls’ carelessly discarded dolls.
This may make it sound like a grim morass of misery, but it isn’t at all. There’s a sort of fairy tale feel to the book that gives a sense of remove from the events; after all, Petrushevskaya is a writer of a fairy tales, and co-wrote the animated film Tale of Tales. Her memoir is a series of vignettes that dance lightly between bedbugs and attempted gang rapes and the magical night that she snuck into the opera and watched, spellbound, from the rafters.
I also finished Shirley Jackson’s Raising Demons, which has only made me want to read the recent Jackson biography more for purposes of comparison, but I really think I’ll get more out of it if I finish reading at least her novels first (I’m not holding out to finish all the short stories). I’ve still got The Road Through the Wall, The Bird’s Nest, and The Sundial.
What I’m Reading Now
Frans de Waal’s Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, which is less deliciously snarky the Carl Safina’s Beyond Words but just as chock full of wonderful anecdotes - not only about animal behavior, but about the major players in the animal intelligence debates in the twentieth century, many of whom de Waal knew personally. My favorite story so far is the part where B. F. Skinner and his colleagues try to take over a primate facility to make it into an operant conditioning laboratory, which involved cutting the chimpanzees’ food to starvation rations, only Skinner was foiled (rumor has it) because the staff kept feeding the chimpanzees on the sly at night because they felt so bad for them.
The more I read about B. F. Skinner the more disturbing he seems.
I’ve also begun Willa Cather’s My Antonia, although I’m not far enough in to have anything more in depth to say than that Cather is awfully good at describing prairies. I’m not usually much for lengthy nature description, but she makes it so clear that you can see it.
What I Plan to Read Next
One of my classmates from college published a book, The Far Field, and I thought it would be nice to read it because I knew her slightly… and then it occurred to me that the book would also fit my reading challenge for “a book outside your (genre) comfort zone,” so it’s happening.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-13 02:43 pm (UTC)The Girl from the Metropole Hotel actually rings a bell— not because I've heard of the book myself, but I wonder if it was an inspiration for Amor Towles' A Gentleman in Moscow? It's set entirely in the Metropole hotel, since the titular gentleman is under house arrest there, and one of the characters is a little girl who grows up in the hotel.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-14 01:33 am (UTC)I'm fairly sure A Gentleman in Moscow was published first, so it's probably a case of convergent evolution rather than inspiration: the Metropole Hotel was just a big site for Communist party happenings. (Also, maybe I should do A Gentleman in Moscow for my reading challenge "a book you chose for the cover." I have eyed the cover repeatedly...)