Wednesday Reading Meme
Oct. 30th, 2019 09:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
I wrapped up Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, which has the distinction of being the first 18th century novel I’ve enjoyed. (No, wait, there was The Castle of Otranto.) Perhaps I am at last prepared to dive into The Mysteries of Udolpho and Evelina??
...On second thought maybe I should stick with the shorter 18th century novels for now. Both of those are Very Long.
I also finished Shirley Jackson’s The Road through the Wall, which means I’ve now read all the Shirley Jackson novels! (Oh no. Maybe I should have spread them out more?) The Road through the Wall was Jackson’s first novel, and tells the story of a neighborhood rather than following a small group of people, as most of her other books do. (I wished for both a cast list and a map of the neighborhood: there are so many characters that it’s hard to keep them all straight and their houses in the right place in my head.)
And I zoomed through Jenny Han’s Always and Forever, Lara Jean, which is an adorable and fitting end for the series. I particularly love the family relationships in this series - not just Lara Jean and her sisters (although I do love Lara Jean and her sisters!), but also her relationship with her dad, and her dad’s girlfriend, and the way the book negotiates both the difficulties and the pleasures of welcoming a new person into the family. As Lara Jean puts it:
“Families shrink and expand. All you can really do is be glad for it, glad for each other, for as long as you have each other.”
But I’m a bit of a Philistine, because I definitely felt that Peter and Lara Jean should have remained broken up at the end. Lara Jean, your mother was absolutely right: don’t go to college with a boyfriend. And for God’s sake, don’t promise to call each other every night! Neither of them will be fully present at their college during those crucial early months when real friendships start to form, because they’ll always be dashing off to make these phone calls. And when they finally do break up, they’ll be doubly isolated, because they won’t have each other and they also won’t have made close college friends.
However, I comfort myself that Jenny Han knows this perfectly well (notice that Margot is not pining over high school boyfriend Josh Sanderson in this book; she’s moved on to a charming young man from university!), and Lara Jean and Peter only stay together because it’s a genre requirement.
What I’m Reading Now
Booth Tarkington’s Seventeen: A Tale of Youth and Summertime and the Baxter Family Especially William, a comic novel about a seventeen-year-old boy in the throes of first love. Tarkington is excellent at portraying the self-important aspects of adolescence - in fact, possibly just self-importance in general; there’s also a little dog with a Napoleon complex who routs a much larger mongrel through sheer force of self-belief.
I’ve also just started George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. Currently Orwell has just arrived at the trenches, where he has been issued a rifle so old that it probably can’t fire (he didn’t get one earlier because the Reds have so few rifles that they just keep the ones they have at the trenches and pass them off as new troops arrive), but that’s okay because the Fascist trenches are out of rifle range anyway. Mostly he is contending with the cold and the ever-present stench of excrement.
What I Plan to Read Next
I am repining because I am out of Lara Jean books. Jenny Han has written other books, I know, and perhaps I should give them a try, but the covers suggest they don’t have the same baking-in-your-pajamas aesthetic the Lara Jean books do, and that’s really what I want. But perhaps the covers are misleading? Or perhaps there are books by other authors with a similar aesthetic? Help me find them, DW friends!
I wrapped up Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, which has the distinction of being the first 18th century novel I’ve enjoyed. (No, wait, there was The Castle of Otranto.) Perhaps I am at last prepared to dive into The Mysteries of Udolpho and Evelina??
...On second thought maybe I should stick with the shorter 18th century novels for now. Both of those are Very Long.
I also finished Shirley Jackson’s The Road through the Wall, which means I’ve now read all the Shirley Jackson novels! (Oh no. Maybe I should have spread them out more?) The Road through the Wall was Jackson’s first novel, and tells the story of a neighborhood rather than following a small group of people, as most of her other books do. (I wished for both a cast list and a map of the neighborhood: there are so many characters that it’s hard to keep them all straight and their houses in the right place in my head.)
And I zoomed through Jenny Han’s Always and Forever, Lara Jean, which is an adorable and fitting end for the series. I particularly love the family relationships in this series - not just Lara Jean and her sisters (although I do love Lara Jean and her sisters!), but also her relationship with her dad, and her dad’s girlfriend, and the way the book negotiates both the difficulties and the pleasures of welcoming a new person into the family. As Lara Jean puts it:
“Families shrink and expand. All you can really do is be glad for it, glad for each other, for as long as you have each other.”
But I’m a bit of a Philistine, because I definitely felt that Peter and Lara Jean should have remained broken up at the end. Lara Jean, your mother was absolutely right: don’t go to college with a boyfriend. And for God’s sake, don’t promise to call each other every night! Neither of them will be fully present at their college during those crucial early months when real friendships start to form, because they’ll always be dashing off to make these phone calls. And when they finally do break up, they’ll be doubly isolated, because they won’t have each other and they also won’t have made close college friends.
However, I comfort myself that Jenny Han knows this perfectly well (notice that Margot is not pining over high school boyfriend Josh Sanderson in this book; she’s moved on to a charming young man from university!), and Lara Jean and Peter only stay together because it’s a genre requirement.
What I’m Reading Now
Booth Tarkington’s Seventeen: A Tale of Youth and Summertime and the Baxter Family Especially William, a comic novel about a seventeen-year-old boy in the throes of first love. Tarkington is excellent at portraying the self-important aspects of adolescence - in fact, possibly just self-importance in general; there’s also a little dog with a Napoleon complex who routs a much larger mongrel through sheer force of self-belief.
I’ve also just started George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. Currently Orwell has just arrived at the trenches, where he has been issued a rifle so old that it probably can’t fire (he didn’t get one earlier because the Reds have so few rifles that they just keep the ones they have at the trenches and pass them off as new troops arrive), but that’s okay because the Fascist trenches are out of rifle range anyway. Mostly he is contending with the cold and the ever-present stench of excrement.
What I Plan to Read Next
I am repining because I am out of Lara Jean books. Jenny Han has written other books, I know, and perhaps I should give them a try, but the covers suggest they don’t have the same baking-in-your-pajamas aesthetic the Lara Jean books do, and that’s really what I want. But perhaps the covers are misleading? Or perhaps there are books by other authors with a similar aesthetic? Help me find them, DW friends!
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Date: 2019-10-30 01:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-10-31 01:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-10-30 02:40 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2019-10-30 05:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-10-31 01:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-10-30 06:34 pm (UTC)Thanks to you, I bought a paperback Vicar of Wakefield from the used-book corner of an antique store in Pine Mountain, GA. It appears to be the same cheap edition that my parents had in all those years I didn't read it.
Oh yeah, definitely don't go to college with a boyfriend. I don't know that series at all, but I'm nodding right along with that good advice.
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Date: 2019-10-31 01:50 am (UTC)I realize that the publisher might have actually fallen down dead from horror if Jenny Han actually stuck to her guns and had Lara Jean and Peter break up at the end of the trilogy, but all the same I'm sad that she doesn't. It's such good advice! So prominently featured in the series! Lara Jean should take it as an example to us all.
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Date: 2019-10-30 08:33 pm (UTC)You know you want to! Well, probably not. Although I can say that Udolpho gets much livelier after the first 250 pages. Up till then it depends how you feel about descriptions of nature. But it does contain some 100% skippable poetry so is slightly less long than it appears!
:-D
(I think my reading my Gothics in order helped, because seeing how The Old English Baron came out of Otranto, and Udolpho out of them both, helped me appreciate it more than I would otherwise have done.)
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Date: 2019-10-31 01:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-10-31 08:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-10-31 02:36 am (UTC)Here is my confession: I have not read any Shirley Jackson novels. Not even one!
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Date: 2019-10-31 08:11 pm (UTC)If you want to remedy the lack of Shirley Jackson in your life, The Haunting of Hill House is my personal favorite (I'm also very fond of Hangsaman, but it's not as well constructed as some of her later novels), and I think We Have Always Lived in the Castle is the most well-known... and there's a movie version (directed by a woman!) with Sebastian Stan, which I've been meaning to see.
But not reading Shirley Jackson is also a valid choice. I hadn't read any of her novels till about a year ago either.
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Date: 2019-11-03 07:12 am (UTC)