Wednesday Reading Meme on Thursday
Jan. 2nd, 2020 08:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Sarah Handley-Cousins’s Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North turned out to be less useful to me than I had hoped. Not only was there very little about amputees, it’s a lot more focused on northern perceptions about war disabilities (particularly ones less blatantly obvious than amputation) than on the lived experience of disabled veterans, with the notable exception of one chapter focused on Joshua Chamberlain who got shot through the hips (as in, the bullet entered one hip and went out the other), which caused various complicated health problems for the rest of his life.
I also read Jane Austen’s Lady Susan, which I had somehow failed to read until now, and found almost unbearably gripping: even though it’s very short, really a novella more than a novel, I barely restrained myself from checking Wikipedia to reassure myself that Lady Susan’s daughter Frederica would escape her mother’s machinations to force her to marry a man that she loathes, a plan which Lady Susan pursues with spiteful tenacity.
Lady Susan’s behavior toward her daughter is so chilling. She puts up the facade of the loving mother of a troubled child, but it’s only a selfish pose: she uses it to gain sympathy for herself (so patient with the pigheaded child!) while turning everyone else against Frederica so the girl will have no allies against Lady Susan’s machinations.
What I’m Reading Now
I really MEANT to wait a while before reading Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch... but I definitely failed, am reading it right now, may be enjoying it even more than The Secret History. The Secret History kicks off with a murder and spends the rest of the book unspooling it; The Goldfinch kicks off with a terrorist attack on the Metropolitan Museum of Art but as yet has displayed little interest in that attack (we hear in an aside that it was committed by right-wing terrorists) except insofar as it pulled the rug out from under thirteen-year-old Theo’s feet when his mother died and left him virtually an orphan.
Through a convoluted series of events, Theo has started helping out refurbishing the furniture at an antiques store, and I would not have expected this but I am HERE for the loving descriptions of antique furniture.
I’ve also begun yet another William Dean Howells novel (possibly I have a Howells problem?), A Modern Instance, which Wikipedia informed me is one of the first American novels to deal seriously with the possibility of divorce. So far, Howells hasn’t even gotten the unhappy couple together, so it will be a while so I can report back on the divorcyness of it all.
What I Plan to Read Next
The Goldfinch waylaid me in my goal of finishing all the Newbery Honor books of the 2010s before the New Year, but I did make a good dent in them: there are only two left, Splendors and Glooms and Heart of a Samurai, and I figure I can finish those before the 2020 winners are announced near the end of January.
Also!!! I have a copy of Don Quixote!! And I have high hopes of getting on with this book better than Kristin Lavransdatter. (It helps that the chapters are very short, a much better size for bedtime reading.)evelyn_b, I liked to finish up the Newberys of the 2010s before I get cracking on Don Quixote, but I should be done with those by the end of January. Perhaps a February start?
Sarah Handley-Cousins’s Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North turned out to be less useful to me than I had hoped. Not only was there very little about amputees, it’s a lot more focused on northern perceptions about war disabilities (particularly ones less blatantly obvious than amputation) than on the lived experience of disabled veterans, with the notable exception of one chapter focused on Joshua Chamberlain who got shot through the hips (as in, the bullet entered one hip and went out the other), which caused various complicated health problems for the rest of his life.
I also read Jane Austen’s Lady Susan, which I had somehow failed to read until now, and found almost unbearably gripping: even though it’s very short, really a novella more than a novel, I barely restrained myself from checking Wikipedia to reassure myself that Lady Susan’s daughter Frederica would escape her mother’s machinations to force her to marry a man that she loathes, a plan which Lady Susan pursues with spiteful tenacity.
Lady Susan’s behavior toward her daughter is so chilling. She puts up the facade of the loving mother of a troubled child, but it’s only a selfish pose: she uses it to gain sympathy for herself (so patient with the pigheaded child!) while turning everyone else against Frederica so the girl will have no allies against Lady Susan’s machinations.
What I’m Reading Now
I really MEANT to wait a while before reading Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch... but I definitely failed, am reading it right now, may be enjoying it even more than The Secret History. The Secret History kicks off with a murder and spends the rest of the book unspooling it; The Goldfinch kicks off with a terrorist attack on the Metropolitan Museum of Art but as yet has displayed little interest in that attack (we hear in an aside that it was committed by right-wing terrorists) except insofar as it pulled the rug out from under thirteen-year-old Theo’s feet when his mother died and left him virtually an orphan.
Through a convoluted series of events, Theo has started helping out refurbishing the furniture at an antiques store, and I would not have expected this but I am HERE for the loving descriptions of antique furniture.
I’ve also begun yet another William Dean Howells novel (possibly I have a Howells problem?), A Modern Instance, which Wikipedia informed me is one of the first American novels to deal seriously with the possibility of divorce. So far, Howells hasn’t even gotten the unhappy couple together, so it will be a while so I can report back on the divorcyness of it all.
What I Plan to Read Next
The Goldfinch waylaid me in my goal of finishing all the Newbery Honor books of the 2010s before the New Year, but I did make a good dent in them: there are only two left, Splendors and Glooms and Heart of a Samurai, and I figure I can finish those before the 2020 winners are announced near the end of January.
Also!!! I have a copy of Don Quixote!! And I have high hopes of getting on with this book better than Kristin Lavransdatter. (It helps that the chapters are very short, a much better size for bedtime reading.)
evelyn_b, I liked to finish up the Newberys of the 2010s before I get cracking on Don Quixote, but I should be done with those by the end of January. Perhaps a February start?
