osprey_archer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer) wrote2020-09-01 08:48 am
osprey_archer) wrote2020-09-01 08:48 am
Wednesday Reading Meme on a Tuesday
As tomorrow (Wednesday) is Honeytrap release day, I’m doing the Wednesday Reading Meme a day early this week.
What I’ve Just Finished Reading
George MacDonald’s The Light Princess is a delightful fairy tale about a princess who is cursed by… well, lightness: she’s both unaffected by gravity, liable to float away on the lightest breeze, and terminally light in spirit, unable to feel any emotions with any degree of gravity.
This being MacDonald, there is of course a moral/philosophical underpinning here, but the main feeling of the book is one of, well, lightness: it’s frolicsome and fun and full of puns. There’s a wonderful scene where her parents bat terms to do with light back and forth. Her father, determined to make the best of the curse, comments that it’s good to be light-footed, lighthearted! - while her mother, more realistic, sighs that it is good neither to be light-fingered nor light-headed.
On the other end of the nineteenth-century fantasy spectrum, I also read William Morris’s The House of the Wolfings, which is an excellent book to read if you loved Lord of the Rings but thought that it was just too bad that the characters, while capable of reciting poetry at the drop of a hat, did not actually speak their lines in verse. Morris has you covered! As his Goths head out to face the Romans, they declaim, sometimes for multiple pages!
Suffice it to say I found The House of the Wolfings a bit of a slog. But at the same time the book is just so very much itself that I can’t help but feel a certain admiration for it. It may not be what I want in a fantasy novel, but by God it’s what Morris wanted and he did it to the very utmost. (And if you are a Tolkien fan, there’s an added interest in that this is a book he read and liked. It may be the source for the name of the forest Mirkwood in The Hobbit.)
When I was a child, I never read the Babysitters Little Sister books; I was, in fact, invincibly opposed to them, in the way that children sometimes are opposed to things that are aimed at children ever so slightly younger than they are. (I also disdained Barney.) But piggybacking on the success of the Babysitters Club graphic novels, two Little Sister books (Karen’s Witch and Karen’s Roller Skates) have also been adapted into graphic novel form, so I decided that I had to check them out, and…
Well, to be honest, I still find Karen Brewer annoying. I guess some things never change!
But also sometimes things do, because as I mentioned last week, I didn’t get on with Willa Cather when I was in college (one of my friends had become a Cather fangirl and I just Did Not Get It), but over time I’ve grown to appreciate her, and quite liked O Pioneers!, especially from a sociological standpoint; it was interesting to see Cather’s viewpoint on all these disparate immigrant groups meeting in the Nebraska plains: Swedes, Bohemians, the French, etc.
What I’m Reading Now
Tamar Adler has had a new book out for two years and I didn’t even notice, WHY, HOW, anyway, I am making up for lost time by reading Something Old, Something New: Classic Recipes Revisited, a work of minor culinary archaeology (I believe the recipes are mostly from within the last two hundred years, not like this Atlantic article about recreating ancient Egyptian bread, which sounds amazing but NOT a project for my home kitchen). The only thing I love more than history is history that is EDIBLE.
I’m also reading James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, about which more anon, but for now I just want to leave you with this quote from a review of Carmen Jones, a 1950s black cast musical based loosely on the opera Carmen. The actors, Baldwin notes wearily, “appear to undergo a tiny, strangling death before resolutely substituting ‘de’ for ‘the.’”
What I Plan to Read Next
Did you know that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a sequel to Kidnapped, called various Catriona (UK) or David Balfour (USA)? Like The Light Princess and The House of the Wolfings and even O Pioneers!, this is research for the boarding-school-friends-reconnect-after-World-War-I book, let’s just call it David & Robert for now so I don’t have to recapitulate the book every Wednesday Reading Meme, as it may affect my reading for quite some time.
Perhaps I ought to read more early twentieth century boarding school books. You know, for research. Maybe I ought to take another run at Mike & Psmith. (Actually, it looks like Mike & Psmith is the sequel to Mike, so really I ought to start there.)
What I’ve Just Finished Reading
George MacDonald’s The Light Princess is a delightful fairy tale about a princess who is cursed by… well, lightness: she’s both unaffected by gravity, liable to float away on the lightest breeze, and terminally light in spirit, unable to feel any emotions with any degree of gravity.
This being MacDonald, there is of course a moral/philosophical underpinning here, but the main feeling of the book is one of, well, lightness: it’s frolicsome and fun and full of puns. There’s a wonderful scene where her parents bat terms to do with light back and forth. Her father, determined to make the best of the curse, comments that it’s good to be light-footed, lighthearted! - while her mother, more realistic, sighs that it is good neither to be light-fingered nor light-headed.
On the other end of the nineteenth-century fantasy spectrum, I also read William Morris’s The House of the Wolfings, which is an excellent book to read if you loved Lord of the Rings but thought that it was just too bad that the characters, while capable of reciting poetry at the drop of a hat, did not actually speak their lines in verse. Morris has you covered! As his Goths head out to face the Romans, they declaim, sometimes for multiple pages!
Suffice it to say I found The House of the Wolfings a bit of a slog. But at the same time the book is just so very much itself that I can’t help but feel a certain admiration for it. It may not be what I want in a fantasy novel, but by God it’s what Morris wanted and he did it to the very utmost. (And if you are a Tolkien fan, there’s an added interest in that this is a book he read and liked. It may be the source for the name of the forest Mirkwood in The Hobbit.)
When I was a child, I never read the Babysitters Little Sister books; I was, in fact, invincibly opposed to them, in the way that children sometimes are opposed to things that are aimed at children ever so slightly younger than they are. (I also disdained Barney.) But piggybacking on the success of the Babysitters Club graphic novels, two Little Sister books (Karen’s Witch and Karen’s Roller Skates) have also been adapted into graphic novel form, so I decided that I had to check them out, and…
Well, to be honest, I still find Karen Brewer annoying. I guess some things never change!
But also sometimes things do, because as I mentioned last week, I didn’t get on with Willa Cather when I was in college (one of my friends had become a Cather fangirl and I just Did Not Get It), but over time I’ve grown to appreciate her, and quite liked O Pioneers!, especially from a sociological standpoint; it was interesting to see Cather’s viewpoint on all these disparate immigrant groups meeting in the Nebraska plains: Swedes, Bohemians, the French, etc.
What I’m Reading Now
Tamar Adler has had a new book out for two years and I didn’t even notice, WHY, HOW, anyway, I am making up for lost time by reading Something Old, Something New: Classic Recipes Revisited, a work of minor culinary archaeology (I believe the recipes are mostly from within the last two hundred years, not like this Atlantic article about recreating ancient Egyptian bread, which sounds amazing but NOT a project for my home kitchen). The only thing I love more than history is history that is EDIBLE.
I’m also reading James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, about which more anon, but for now I just want to leave you with this quote from a review of Carmen Jones, a 1950s black cast musical based loosely on the opera Carmen. The actors, Baldwin notes wearily, “appear to undergo a tiny, strangling death before resolutely substituting ‘de’ for ‘the.’”
What I Plan to Read Next
Did you know that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a sequel to Kidnapped, called various Catriona (UK) or David Balfour (USA)? Like The Light Princess and The House of the Wolfings and even O Pioneers!, this is research for the boarding-school-friends-reconnect-after-World-War-I book, let’s just call it David & Robert for now so I don’t have to recapitulate the book every Wednesday Reading Meme, as it may affect my reading for quite some time.
Perhaps I ought to read more early twentieth century boarding school books. You know, for research. Maybe I ought to take another run at Mike & Psmith. (Actually, it looks like Mike & Psmith is the sequel to Mike, so really I ought to start there.)
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Do you have a particular favorite of his boarding school stories, or are they all about equally good, would you say?
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I love George MacDonald. Have you read "The Golden Key?"
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I do admire that! I still may not read it!
a review of Carmen Jones, a 1950s black cast musical based loosely on the opera Carmen.
I am familiar with Carmen Jones only in its 1954 film incarnation against which I bear a deathless grudge, because even before I could evaluate the handling of the story, who the hell casts Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge in a musical and then dubs them?
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That's the Carmen Jones Baldwin's writing about, yeah. He doesn't mention the dubbing, possibly because there was just so much else wrong with the movie that he ran out of space.
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but by God it’s what Morris wanted and he did it to the very utmost.
I get that exact feeling from reading E R Eddison. Also Adrienne Martine -Barnes' "The Dragon Rises", which is probably the most bizarre Arthurian novel ever written.
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............................................................................
Honeytrap
Kindle Edition
Sold by Amazon.com Services LLC
YES BABY
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The Psmith books are great, and you totally do not need to go back and start with Mike, unless you really enjoy reading detailed descriptions of cricket.
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Alternatively, the recent Netflix adaptation played Karen's supernatural obsessions in a way that gave her a certain Wednesday Addamsish charm, so maybe other people will soon share your opinion!
I once hoped that I might gain a better grasp of cricket as I read more cricket descriptions, but in fact it does not seem to work that way. I suppose other sports are just as incomprehensible if you don't already know the basic terminology.
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I definitely didn't! :o
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