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osprey_archer) wrote2020-08-05 09:03 am
osprey_archer) wrote2020-08-05 09:03 am
Wednesday Reading Meme
What I’ve Just Finished Reading
Gerald Durrell’s Fauna and Family (also published under the title The Garden of the Gods), the last of the Corfu trilogy. Has anyone read any of Gerald Durrell’s many, many other books? Any recommendations? (copperfyre mentioned A Zoo in My Luggage, The Bafut Beagles, and Golden Bats and Pink Pigeons as childhood favorites… which naturally means those are the ones the library doesn’t have.) The parts I liked best in the Corfu trilogy were his descriptions of his family, but I imagine he brings any cast of characters alive given half a chance.
I also read Eric Walters & Kathy Kacer’s Broken Strings, a historical fiction novel set right after 9/11 (this made me feel old). When Shirli’s high school puts on a production of Fiddler on the Roof, she checks her grandfather’s attic to see if he has any old clothes suitable for the production… and ends up finding a violin with broken strings, which leads Shirli to learn about how her grandfather survived the Holocaust.
This all sounds quite heavy, but the novel is pleasant and ultimately forgettable, although I feel kind of bad saying that about a novel that clearly has such an earnest desire to do good in this world.
I also read Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, which is one of those books I’ve heard about for years and osmosed mostly incorrectly. It’s about Rochester’s marriage to his first wife, Bertha, mostly from her point of view, and I thought it was about Rochester taking mixed-race tropical flower Bertha (whose real name is Antoinette; Rochester just renames her because he’s a dick) to England where the climate and possibly also repressive sexual mores drove her mad, but in fact (1) Antoinette is white (although a less posh type of white than Rochester), (2) they don’t go to England till the very end of the book, after all the madness has happened, and (3) the book is very odd and dreamlike and it’s not entirely clear why Antoinette went mad or indeed sometimes what’s happening at all, although let’s be real, Rochester’s dickishness clearly did not help.
Rochester really does just start calling her Bertha instead of Antoinette because he’s a dick, though.
What I’m Reading Now
I expected Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder to focus on the composition of the Little House books, but in fact that’s only the last third of the book; the first two thirds are sort of a joint biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane, who (at the part of the book I have reached) has just built Laura and Almanzo a fancy and fantastically expensive new house that they didn’t particularly want… just in time for the Great Depression (combined with little-d personal depression) to make it almost impossible for Rose to pay back the debt. ROSE.
I’ve also learned lots of exciting background information about American history, particularly about the ecological disasters caused by the various homesteading programs. I had not realized that the government knew (or should have known) that this was inevitable: John Wesley Powell warned them that almost all the land west of the 100th meridian was too arid for grain farming (or indeed much farming at all aside from cattle) and it would inevitably destroy what little topsoil the land had, and Congress and the newspapers basically responded “LOL, the people want farms so farms will totally work!”
As you can imagine, this gave me a sort of deja vu to current events.
Another thing that struck me is how much information nineteenth century newspapers carry about perfectly ordinary people’s illnesses. When Mary Ingalls was sick with the illness that eventually took her sight, the local newspaper issued daily reports on the progress of the disease, as did the De Smet paper in later years when Laura and her husband Almanzo came down with diphtheria.
I think this could become a cute detail in a novel: a teacher goes out to visit a pupil who has been ill and takes along the paper so the pupil can have the pleasure of seeing her name in print.
What I Plan to Read Next
I wanted to read Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means, but the library doesn’t have it. Has anyone read it? Is it worth going to the bother of an interlibrary loan?
Gerald Durrell’s Fauna and Family (also published under the title The Garden of the Gods), the last of the Corfu trilogy. Has anyone read any of Gerald Durrell’s many, many other books? Any recommendations? (
copperfyre mentioned A Zoo in My Luggage, The Bafut Beagles, and Golden Bats and Pink Pigeons as childhood favorites… which naturally means those are the ones the library doesn’t have.) The parts I liked best in the Corfu trilogy were his descriptions of his family, but I imagine he brings any cast of characters alive given half a chance. I also read Eric Walters & Kathy Kacer’s Broken Strings, a historical fiction novel set right after 9/11 (this made me feel old). When Shirli’s high school puts on a production of Fiddler on the Roof, she checks her grandfather’s attic to see if he has any old clothes suitable for the production… and ends up finding a violin with broken strings, which leads Shirli to learn about how her grandfather survived the Holocaust.
This all sounds quite heavy, but the novel is pleasant and ultimately forgettable, although I feel kind of bad saying that about a novel that clearly has such an earnest desire to do good in this world.
I also read Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, which is one of those books I’ve heard about for years and osmosed mostly incorrectly. It’s about Rochester’s marriage to his first wife, Bertha, mostly from her point of view, and I thought it was about Rochester taking mixed-race tropical flower Bertha (whose real name is Antoinette; Rochester just renames her because he’s a dick) to England where the climate and possibly also repressive sexual mores drove her mad, but in fact (1) Antoinette is white (although a less posh type of white than Rochester), (2) they don’t go to England till the very end of the book, after all the madness has happened, and (3) the book is very odd and dreamlike and it’s not entirely clear why Antoinette went mad or indeed sometimes what’s happening at all, although let’s be real, Rochester’s dickishness clearly did not help.
Rochester really does just start calling her Bertha instead of Antoinette because he’s a dick, though.
What I’m Reading Now
I expected Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder to focus on the composition of the Little House books, but in fact that’s only the last third of the book; the first two thirds are sort of a joint biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane, who (at the part of the book I have reached) has just built Laura and Almanzo a fancy and fantastically expensive new house that they didn’t particularly want… just in time for the Great Depression (combined with little-d personal depression) to make it almost impossible for Rose to pay back the debt. ROSE.
I’ve also learned lots of exciting background information about American history, particularly about the ecological disasters caused by the various homesteading programs. I had not realized that the government knew (or should have known) that this was inevitable: John Wesley Powell warned them that almost all the land west of the 100th meridian was too arid for grain farming (or indeed much farming at all aside from cattle) and it would inevitably destroy what little topsoil the land had, and Congress and the newspapers basically responded “LOL, the people want farms so farms will totally work!”
As you can imagine, this gave me a sort of deja vu to current events.
Another thing that struck me is how much information nineteenth century newspapers carry about perfectly ordinary people’s illnesses. When Mary Ingalls was sick with the illness that eventually took her sight, the local newspaper issued daily reports on the progress of the disease, as did the De Smet paper in later years when Laura and her husband Almanzo came down with diphtheria.
I think this could become a cute detail in a novel: a teacher goes out to visit a pupil who has been ill and takes along the paper so the pupil can have the pleasure of seeing her name in print.
What I Plan to Read Next
I wanted to read Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means, but the library doesn’t have it. Has anyone read it? Is it worth going to the bother of an interlibrary loan?
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Just think of Clive Bell, no great shakes in general and certainly not in Bloomsbury, but compared with Objectivists? Magisterial!