Wednesday Reading Meme
Aug. 26th, 2020 08:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
I finished Mary Norris’s Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, which is lots of fun if you love punctuation and anecdotes about the New Yorker editorial office. (It’s definitely stronger on the punctuation front than the anecdote front, somewhat to my surprise. I also enjoyed the chapter about profanity.) I read the chapter about dashes with particular attention, because I’ve been contemplating changing how I style my dashes. Currently I do them with spaces on either side, which can create weird formatting in print (basically, the dash will fall on a new line, sundered from word before it), which I thought using M-dashes without spaces might solve…
But evidently that’s just how computers format dashes. Maybe I should just use fewer dashes? That might be sensible, but my whole soul revolts against this solution.
At work we’ve been assigned to read Ibram X. Kendi & Jason Reynold’s Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, which is an abridged version of Kendi’s hefty tome Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. I realize that the library probably had good reason not to assign us all a five-hundred-page-long book, but I would probably prefer the long version, because it might make me feel less talked down to. Stamped is an abridgement aimed at teenagers and boy could I feel it.
I spent a lot of time going, “Wait, but it’s more complicated than that. How can you lump Puritan New England and colonial Virginia together as if they’re culturally and economically indistinguishable? How can you skim over the Civil War so fast? (It occurs to me that it’s hard to explain the Civil War once you’ve rendered regional distinctions illegible. This may also explain why the book is vague about the Great Migration.) How can you just skip Reconstruction?”
Also at work, I’ve been spending a lot of time on door duty (ensuring that everyone who comes in is wearing a mask and that the building stays below capacity), so I’ve been looking for short books to read while on door. Thus, Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman and Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means.
Although I got them because they’re both short, they both turn out to have a number of other commonalities: they are both intensely evocative of place (a convenience store in modern Tokyo; a girls’ residential hotel in World War II London), neither cares particularly whether the characters are likable, and in both books I felt that the author was trying to make a point which I didn’t fully grasp, although I enjoyed the view into the complexities of their seemingly mundane worlds so much that it didn’t really matter.
And finally, I read E. F. Benson’s David Blaize and the Blue Door, which is an Alice in Wonderland-ish fantasy that has absolutely nothing to do with the original David Blaize. Benson could just as well have named the hero Otis Crumpet. Possibly he connected the two as a fiendish marketing ploy to draw in unsuspecting readers who enjoyed the first book?
What I’m Reading Now
I was hoping that I had grown into William Morris’s The House of the Wolfings, but alas, I’m still finding it a hard slog. Still, I have persevered, and it’s becoming slightly less hard as I get used to the fact that the characters sometimes speak in poems of ten stanzas.
However, I think perhaps I have grown into Willa Cather. I didn’t like Song of the Skylark when I read it in college, but last year I enjoyed My Antonia, and now I’m reading O Pioneers! (by way of research for a book I’m contemplating) and enjoying it too. I’ve always been a sucker for immigrant stories.
What I Plan to Read Next
E. Lockhart has a new book out (Again Again) and guess who is going to read it? ME, apparently. I saw it on the shelf and couldn’t resist it. E. Lockhart, why can’t I quit you?
I finished Mary Norris’s Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, which is lots of fun if you love punctuation and anecdotes about the New Yorker editorial office. (It’s definitely stronger on the punctuation front than the anecdote front, somewhat to my surprise. I also enjoyed the chapter about profanity.) I read the chapter about dashes with particular attention, because I’ve been contemplating changing how I style my dashes. Currently I do them with spaces on either side, which can create weird formatting in print (basically, the dash will fall on a new line, sundered from word before it), which I thought using M-dashes without spaces might solve…
But evidently that’s just how computers format dashes. Maybe I should just use fewer dashes? That might be sensible, but my whole soul revolts against this solution.
At work we’ve been assigned to read Ibram X. Kendi & Jason Reynold’s Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, which is an abridged version of Kendi’s hefty tome Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. I realize that the library probably had good reason not to assign us all a five-hundred-page-long book, but I would probably prefer the long version, because it might make me feel less talked down to. Stamped is an abridgement aimed at teenagers and boy could I feel it.
I spent a lot of time going, “Wait, but it’s more complicated than that. How can you lump Puritan New England and colonial Virginia together as if they’re culturally and economically indistinguishable? How can you skim over the Civil War so fast? (It occurs to me that it’s hard to explain the Civil War once you’ve rendered regional distinctions illegible. This may also explain why the book is vague about the Great Migration.) How can you just skip Reconstruction?”
Also at work, I’ve been spending a lot of time on door duty (ensuring that everyone who comes in is wearing a mask and that the building stays below capacity), so I’ve been looking for short books to read while on door. Thus, Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman and Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means.
Although I got them because they’re both short, they both turn out to have a number of other commonalities: they are both intensely evocative of place (a convenience store in modern Tokyo; a girls’ residential hotel in World War II London), neither cares particularly whether the characters are likable, and in both books I felt that the author was trying to make a point which I didn’t fully grasp, although I enjoyed the view into the complexities of their seemingly mundane worlds so much that it didn’t really matter.
And finally, I read E. F. Benson’s David Blaize and the Blue Door, which is an Alice in Wonderland-ish fantasy that has absolutely nothing to do with the original David Blaize. Benson could just as well have named the hero Otis Crumpet. Possibly he connected the two as a fiendish marketing ploy to draw in unsuspecting readers who enjoyed the first book?
What I’m Reading Now
I was hoping that I had grown into William Morris’s The House of the Wolfings, but alas, I’m still finding it a hard slog. Still, I have persevered, and it’s becoming slightly less hard as I get used to the fact that the characters sometimes speak in poems of ten stanzas.
However, I think perhaps I have grown into Willa Cather. I didn’t like Song of the Skylark when I read it in college, but last year I enjoyed My Antonia, and now I’m reading O Pioneers! (by way of research for a book I’m contemplating) and enjoying it too. I’ve always been a sucker for immigrant stories.
What I Plan to Read Next
E. Lockhart has a new book out (Again Again) and guess who is going to read it? ME, apparently. I saw it on the shelf and couldn’t resist it. E. Lockhart, why can’t I quit you?
