Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

As a birthday present to myself I read Elizabeth Wein’s White Eagles, a short novel about a young woman flying with the Polish army at the beginning of World War II. If you know anything about the invasion of Poland, you’ll be able to guess that this has some dark moments, but overall it’s about our heroine flying away from Poland (with a stowaway!) so the grimness-to-adventure ratio ultimately tilts toward adventure.

As a further birthday present to myself (White Eagles is QUITE short), I read Francesca Forrest’s new short story Duplication, which takes place in a world a little slantwise from ours: sometimes people, especially children, will duplicate for a few hours, a day or two at most, so that there are two of the same person running around for a while till they merge back into one.

The story is concerned with the everyday experience of a mother whose daughter suddenly becomes two daughters, and the philosophical question - although with a certain lived urgency that philosophical questions often lack - of what it means for one person to become two. To what extent are the duplicates two separate entities? What does it mean - what is lost - what the duplicates merge back into one?

I also finished Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, which I read because I enjoyed the miniseries adaptation so much. (Well, enjoyed seems like the wrong word for such a bleak story, but you know what I mean.) It turns out that the adaptation was extraordinarily faithful, to the point that Grace tells her story in the exact words she uses in the book (I often had the eerie sense of hearing the words in the actress’s voice as I read), which, well, if you’ve got Margaret Atwood’s words at your disposal, why wouldn’t you?

The main difference is that the book includes a subplot in which Dr. Jordan, the doctor interviewing Grace Marks to try to prove her innocence, becomes sexually entangled with his landlady. In general I found Dr. Jordan’s POV unpleasant to read: he has such an instrumental view of people, always with an eye for how they can be of service to him (sexually, for women, and in his career, for men), and few signs of actual affection for anyone. Thus, the book induces an even stronger feeling of “WHY ARE MEN” than the miniseries, which also didn’t skimp in this regard.

What I’m Reading Now

I finished part one of Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, and I’m taking a break before I read part two because it’s such a dense, intensely emotional book.

Thus, I’m treating myself to Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha. Following series order, I should have read Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station, but the ebook was checked out and I figured, “There’s not super a lot of continuity in this series, it will be fine if I skip it for now!”

Reader, it turns out that Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha builds heavily on Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station. So I’m kicking myself, although honestly it doesn’t matter all that much: the books are clearly interrelated, but not so much that I’m finding anything in Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha hard to follow. Anyway one doesn’t read the Mrs. Pollifax books expecting surprises, but because it’s such a pleasure to spend time with Mrs. Pollifax and whoever she has befriended in the course of this book’s spying mission.

A quote I noted down, as exemplary of Mrs. Pollifax’s character: “Mrs. Pollifax measured intelligence by curiosity, rueing people who never asked questions, never asked why, or what happened next or how.”

What I Plan to Read Next

I intend to continue my Margaret Atwood journey with The Penelopiad, but before that, I really MUST attend to this stack of library books that has been moldering patiently on my bookshelf. (I’ve been clinging to them in the superstitious sense that we might go back on lockdown at any time, but I am coming to the conclusion that this would be MUCH too sensible for the government to ever actually do it.) First up: James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain.

Comments

[oracne]

Mrs. Pollifax FTW!

[osprey_archer]

I have just realized that one of the Mrs. Pollifax film adaptations stars Rosalind Russell and I may have to see it.

[troisoiseaux]

I’m taking a break before I read part two because it’s such a dense, intensely emotional book.

It really is.

[osprey_archer]

There's so much emotion! I can only take so much vicarious emotion in 2020.

[asakiyume]

I really like that adjective instrumental as a way of describing that characteristic. Super-duper unpleasant characteristic.

Re: the Mrs. Pollifax quote, YES! I always think of incurious as a very damning descriptor (though in stories and in real life there can be good reasons for people to be that way).

(And thank you!)

[osprey_archer]

I kept wanting to shake him and be like "Have you ever considered that people have a value outside of the service they offer you? HAVE YOU EVER??" Of course he had not.

I think people sometimes get beaten down by life into incuriosity, and that can be sad, but even so it's not a winning quality - the circumstances just make it more understandable.

[sovay]

Thus, the book induces an even stronger feeling of “WHY ARE MEN” than the miniseries, which also didn’t skimp in this regard.

Did it make his ending feel more earned, or at least more proportional, assuming it's the same as in the miniseries?

[osprey_archer]

TBH I'm not sure "He's mostly paralyzed and he's lost his memory" is ever an ending that's going to feel proportional, exactly, but in the book we only see it at a remove, when his mother describes his fate in a letter, and it's easier to bear that way than actually seeing the poor guy on screen.