Wednesday Reading Meme
Feb. 12th, 2020 08:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
My hold on George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London finally came in and I instantly tossed everything else aside and tore through it. Excellent book: it’s Orwell’s memoirs about his experiences when he was flat broke, first in Paris (where he worked as a plongeur, a dishwasher in a French restaurant) and then in London, where he lived among the tramps, with occasional forays into theory, most notably in his pointed comment that the reason tramps exist is that they’re not allowed to stay in the same casual ward more than one night in a row, so they have to tramp to get to a different one to stay out. Policy, not poverty - or perhaps policy combined with poverty? - created tramps.
In Paris, Orwell pals around with a Russian emigre named Boris, who bears enough similarities to the Boris in The Goldfinch (which I also finished this week! Post forthcoming!) that I sometimes had the weird sense of slipping between books.
I also read Erika Owen’s The Art of Flaneuring: How to Wander with Intention and Discover a Better Life, a svelte little book about the joy of taking walks, mostly because sometimes in the winter I need a kick in the pants to actually get me outside in the cold. It worked! I went outside and took a long walk and found a house with a turquoise door and another that exists in a state of perpetual autumn, with faded Halloween decorations in the windows and dead leaves in the yard.
Also big fuzzy buds on the magnolia tree, which is worrisome from a magnolia-flower perspective, because the low is going to be five degrees Fahrenheit tomorrow and I suspect that will kill those magnolia buds dead.
What I’m Reading Now
I’ve become reading Wendell Berry’s essays in The Art of the Commonplace and I think I love him. It’s funny, because I’ve always heard him described as a conservative thinker, but a lot of his critiques - of the exploitative nature of the technological economy, both ecologically and in terms of labor relations - sound like something a leftist essayist might write today. (I don’t think this means that our political spectrum has shifted rightward, but rather reflects a fundamental change in the nature of American conservativism, which in its Trumpian incarnation is on the side of the exploiters.)
It’s crushing to read an essay Berry wrote circa 1970, say, where he puts his finger directly on the problem with the American government’s environmental policies, or American society’s attitudes toward low-status labor (this is a good companion piece to Orwell, it occurs to me), and know that not only has nothing changed over the past fifty years, but we’re currently going backward.
But he’s also snarky! Like this summation of the letters people wrote criticizing his refusal to buy a computer: “Some of us, it seems, would be better off if we would just realize that this is already the best of all possible worlds, and is going to get even better if we will just buy the right equipment.”
What I Plan to Read Next
Perhaps I’ll finally read Flight #116 Is Down? I got it from the library basically right afterrachelmanija reviewed it, and I keep putting it off because I know from experience that once I start reading a Caroline B. Cooney book, that’s all I’m doing till the book is done… So I keep looking at it and being all “But can I really devote the next few hours of my life to this book?”
Yes, self! You can! Especially given that it’s not particularly long. (I really miss the svelteness of 90s children’s and YA novels. The trend now seems to be toward thicker books, and of course some books need to be that big, but many don’t.)
My hold on George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London finally came in and I instantly tossed everything else aside and tore through it. Excellent book: it’s Orwell’s memoirs about his experiences when he was flat broke, first in Paris (where he worked as a plongeur, a dishwasher in a French restaurant) and then in London, where he lived among the tramps, with occasional forays into theory, most notably in his pointed comment that the reason tramps exist is that they’re not allowed to stay in the same casual ward more than one night in a row, so they have to tramp to get to a different one to stay out. Policy, not poverty - or perhaps policy combined with poverty? - created tramps.
In Paris, Orwell pals around with a Russian emigre named Boris, who bears enough similarities to the Boris in The Goldfinch (which I also finished this week! Post forthcoming!) that I sometimes had the weird sense of slipping between books.
I also read Erika Owen’s The Art of Flaneuring: How to Wander with Intention and Discover a Better Life, a svelte little book about the joy of taking walks, mostly because sometimes in the winter I need a kick in the pants to actually get me outside in the cold. It worked! I went outside and took a long walk and found a house with a turquoise door and another that exists in a state of perpetual autumn, with faded Halloween decorations in the windows and dead leaves in the yard.
Also big fuzzy buds on the magnolia tree, which is worrisome from a magnolia-flower perspective, because the low is going to be five degrees Fahrenheit tomorrow and I suspect that will kill those magnolia buds dead.
What I’m Reading Now
I’ve become reading Wendell Berry’s essays in The Art of the Commonplace and I think I love him. It’s funny, because I’ve always heard him described as a conservative thinker, but a lot of his critiques - of the exploitative nature of the technological economy, both ecologically and in terms of labor relations - sound like something a leftist essayist might write today. (I don’t think this means that our political spectrum has shifted rightward, but rather reflects a fundamental change in the nature of American conservativism, which in its Trumpian incarnation is on the side of the exploiters.)
It’s crushing to read an essay Berry wrote circa 1970, say, where he puts his finger directly on the problem with the American government’s environmental policies, or American society’s attitudes toward low-status labor (this is a good companion piece to Orwell, it occurs to me), and know that not only has nothing changed over the past fifty years, but we’re currently going backward.
But he’s also snarky! Like this summation of the letters people wrote criticizing his refusal to buy a computer: “Some of us, it seems, would be better off if we would just realize that this is already the best of all possible worlds, and is going to get even better if we will just buy the right equipment.”
What I Plan to Read Next
Perhaps I’ll finally read Flight #116 Is Down? I got it from the library basically right after
rachelmanija reviewed it, and I keep putting it off because I know from experience that once I start reading a Caroline B. Cooney book, that’s all I’m doing till the book is done… So I keep looking at it and being all “But can I really devote the next few hours of my life to this book?” Yes, self! You can! Especially given that it’s not particularly long. (I really miss the svelteness of 90s children’s and YA novels. The trend now seems to be toward thicker books, and of course some books need to be that big, but many don’t.)
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Date: 2020-02-12 03:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-12 08:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-12 06:19 pm (UTC)What, really? In that case I need to read the Orwell book.
Flight #116 Is Down! is very short. ;)
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Date: 2020-02-12 08:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-12 08:49 pm (UTC)I have to read that book. That is the most endearing characteristic.
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Date: 2020-02-12 08:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-12 08:33 pm (UTC)I used to really like her when I was a teen, and, as above, read a few extra under the guise of necessary research when I became a children's librarian.
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Date: 2020-02-12 08:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-12 09:26 pm (UTC)I think she may have written for a series called Cheerleaders and she was just much better than you'd expect for that kind of cheap series thing, and then I found some of her other stuff.
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Date: 2020-02-12 09:55 pm (UTC)I don't think I ever read Cheerleaders, but it definitely sounds like something Cooney might have written. There was also a vampire trilogy, and a time travel quartet (which I actually didn't like that much, although I had friends who loved the inherent tragedy of time travel romance where the pairing Can Never Be Together, except I think one of the couples actually did end up staying together, because the girl abandoned her own time?) and there's one where a little girl gets kidnapped by the baddies but saves herself by using the car headlights to signal SOS.
I also read The Face on the Milk Carton series, but I haaaated Janie's boyfriend, which really limited my ability to appreciate the series.
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Date: 2020-02-13 09:28 am (UTC)Oh, yeah. I'm only kind of sorry they weren't as actually full on supernatural as they felt while reading them.
I didn't imagine Cheerleaders, look:
https://cheerleadersrecaps.wordpress.com/
https://www.goodreads.com/series/61741-cheerleaders
I was trying to remember why on earth I would have been reading something like that, because it was really not typical me, but OTOH the teen collection wasn't huge and I wound up reading almost everything on the two carousels that wasn't full on horror/overly grim issues books (80s/90s teen; it was the era of the seriously grim issues teen novel with bonus nuclear wastelands). But also there was one where their minibus gets taken hostage and teen me could not resist that obv and then the whole thing was better than it should have been. At least compared to Sweet Valley High, anyway. Looking at it, CBC didn't write many of them, but they were generally done by the everyone who'd later be in the scholastic Point Horror gang (or published under that banner here, I have a feeling they were just individual novels originally in the US?), so probably several of them were at least a notch above SVH ghostwriter types. (I'm looking at that list of them now and I can't see the hostage one but there was a hostage one! All I remember is better than I expected + hostage situation. I can picture the cover, except we had the yellow ones above not the ones on goodreads.)
ETA: Totally found the hostage one. It has bondage on the cover. *g*
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Date: 2020-02-13 01:44 pm (UTC)I think Point Horror was a line in the US, too, although I never got deeply into the Point Horror scene so I'm not too sure about the ins and outs of publication. But definitely they had a specific cover design - you could just look at certain covers and know that's what you were getting. Point Horror! Surprisingly better than other books of the same type!
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Date: 2020-02-13 08:27 pm (UTC)and it's so impressive that Cooney managed that without anything actually supernatural at all.
I do feel still a tiny bit cheated by that because I always prefer there to be magic/supernatural! Go for it, yes. :-D But, yeah, they were really intense teen reading.
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Date: 2020-02-13 03:23 am (UTC)Cooney's hallmark!
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Date: 2020-02-13 09:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-13 08:05 pm (UTC)And I should read more Wendell Berry. His essay on why he wouldn't be buying a computer really resonated with me (though I had already bought a computer at the time and would buy others).
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Date: 2020-02-13 10:14 pm (UTC)The essay collection I'm reading, while it has an essay that he wrote in response to the letters he received about his "Why I'm Not Buying a Computer" essay, does not have the "Why I'm Not Buying a Computer" essay (which probably has a totally different title, anyway) - or at least, if it does, it's later in the book. If it's not there, I should try to track it down.
It's kind of weird that I want to read it, because I have a computer and have had one for so long that it's hard to imagine my life without it? And I feel it's enriched my life, but possibly by impoverishing some of the non-computer parts of it, so although it may ultimately be a net positive, I don't feel that it's an unadulterated positive.
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Date: 2020-02-14 12:21 am (UTC)http://tipiglen.co.uk/berrynot.html
(I don't actually think it's that ironic. The point of the essay isn't so much that computers are the worst thing ever, but that it's a good idea to think about any new technologies as tools whose usefulness and suitability you can evaluate, rather than as weather you just have to adapt to. My rules for what I buy or adopt aren't exactly the same as Berry's, but I find it helpful to have rules of the same kind).
How do you feel computers have possibly impovershed the not-computer parts of your life?
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Date: 2020-02-16 01:43 pm (UTC)Anyway. Re: how computers have impoverished the non-computer parts of my life: I know there have been times in my life where I've used computers to avoid my problems, and of course there's no guarantee that I would have dealt with my problems better in the absence of computers (libraries still existed! I could have avoided my problems in physical books!) - but I do think computers make it easier just because there is so much content right there without even the minimal effort of taking a new book off the shelf. So computers didn't create this tendency, but perhaps they made it easier to indulge?
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Date: 2020-02-17 05:14 pm (UTC)ETA -- Oh, I see from the other comments that you've already read the essay in question, so never mind, I guess? Still think he sounds like a smug asshole personally even when I agree with him intellectually.