Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Francesca Forrest’s The Gown of Harmonies is actually a reread - I first read it in 2018 in the anthology It Happened at the Ball - but it seemed like a good time for a light-hearted reread, the story of a blind seamstress who sews the titular gown of harmonies, which harmonizes with the music at the ball.

I love the way that this story engages all the senses - particularly hearing, of course, but also the sense of smell, like this quote, which combines the two (and actually the sense of touch, as well - that inaudible hum): “The inaudible hum of magic was in the air, the scent of it, almost like pepper…”

Obviously I’ve never smelled magic, but I love the idea that it smells like pepper: bright and startling and delicious, and a little bit dangerous, too.

On the not-light-at-all side, I finished Svetlana Aleksievich’s Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, which has been an oddly comforting companion to the current disaster? It’s just nice to reflect that, while things aren’t going great for us humans right now, at least this time around we haven’t poisoned the actual ground (not to mention the dogs, the cats, the cabbages, etc…) - the people that Aleksievich interviews mention over and over the strangeness of being told to bulldoze cabbages that looks perfectly healthy, unusually beautiful in fact, but are actually practically pulsing with radiation.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve finally started Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall! Which is actually the second book I’ve read that’s set in an academic reenactment of life in Iron Age Britain. Is this just something that British people do occasionally, like Morris dancing?

Anyway, Voices from Chernobyl took up my Serious Reading brain for this week, so I didn’t make it terribly far in this, but I’ve had it on my stack for so long that I feel pleased to have begun.

What I Plan to Read Next

Who even knows? I’m a will-o-the-wisp in the wind these days.

Comments

[asakiyume]

Thank you so much for the reread! Forthwith I will use your kind words to promote the story :-)

And I understand what you mean about other things being all right (re: Voices from Chernobyl). I feel like that when I see the flowers coming up and the trees getting ready to leaf out, and the birds.

[osprey_archer]

I tried to leave an Amazon review, but Amazon wouldn't let me! :( :(

I've been super enjoying the flowers this spring, precisely because they're so beautiful and normal when everything else is so strange.

[troisoiseaux]

Which is actually the second book I’ve read that’s set in an academic reenactment of life in Iron Age Britain.

What's the other one?

[osprey_archer]

Diane Stanley's A Time Apart, a middle grade novel (maybe YA? it's been a while since I read it) about a girl who is sent to live with her father in England after her mother gets sick. The father is spending the year in an Iron Age reenactment, so Ginny gets roped into it too.

[kore]

Aha, I think I remembered you reviewed this one but I couldn't remember any details!

[osprey_archer]

I'm pretty sure I never reviewed A Time Apart here, as I read it in high school, so maybe you read about it somewhere else?

[kore]

....well that's embarrassing. Bzuh, now I have no idea where I heard of it!

[maplemood]

Voices from Chernobyl is absolutely wonderful--it's stuck with me ever since I read it.

[osprey_archer]

Yeah, it definitely seems like a book that would stick with you for a while! So many of the details are haunting.

[kore]

I really liked Ghost Wall a lot. What was the other re-enactment book you read?

(Should have read the comments, duh!)

[osprey_archer]

I find it a little maddening that there are no quotation marks. Just use quotation marks already!