Wednesday Reading Meme
Nov. 18th, 2020 08:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerThis week we’re having a rare edition of Books I’ve Abandoned, because I just can’t with Robert Louis Stevenson’s Catriona anymore. No one wants to read a hundred pages of Davie Balfour traipsing around Edinburgh talking to lawyers, Stevenson! No one!!!
What I’ve Just Finished Reading
I read Joan Weigall Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock because I was intrigued by stills from the 1975 movie and the more recent miniseries, and now that I’ve read it, I’m fascinated to know how anyone ever managed to make the darn thing into a movie. It’s so diffuse and purposefully unsatisfying! Three boarding school girls (plus one of the teachers) disappear at Hanging Rock; only one is ever seen again, and she remembers nothing, so there isn’t enough information to even guess what might have happened.
There’s also an ancillary - murder? Suicide? At any rate, death - near the end of the book, although in that case there is at least a strong implication that the headmistress, driven to the breaking point by the stress of the bad publicity following the girls’ disappearance, murdered her youngest pupil under the impression that the girl’s guardian had abandoned her after running up an enormous bill. In fact, the guardian was just beyond the reach of the post office and sent a letter to settle the account as soon as he returned to civilization, which arrived just a few days after the girl’s death. The headmistress then commits suicide by jumping off Hanging Rock. That is just the kind of book this is.
Jim Murphy’s The Great Fire is a Newbery Honor book about, wait for it, the Great Fire of Chicago in 1871. A fast, informative read. I was particularly interested to learn about nineteenth century attitudes toward fires-as-entertainment - as good as a night at the theater, and cheaper, too! - and cutting edge fire-fighting techniques in 1871.
There were six holds on Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting: Five Lives in London Between the Wars, so I powered through to get it back before the due date. It’s renewed my long-standing intention to read more of Virginia Woolf’s work, although, alas, this year I’ve also renewed my long-standing intentions to read E. M. Forster’s Maurice, the rest of James Baldwin’s novels, and the complete works of Mary Renault, so it may be some time before I make any headway on Woolf.
I also read Hiromi Kawakami’s Strange Weather in Tokyo (translated from Japanese by Allison Markin Powell), which I enjoyed despite a VERY misleading cover featuring a girl floating in a convenience store. Reader, there are no floating girls OR convenience stores in this book. Instead it’s a quiet, meditative story about a woman of almost forty who runs into her aging high school Japanese teacher by accident at a bar and the friendship that grows between them and slowly develops into a romance.
I was a little doubtful about the teacher/student aspect of this story, but actually it didn’t end up bothering me at all. The fact that they have this previous acquaintance is the reason they originally speak to each other, but the relationship that develops is very much something new; Tsukiko wasn’t one of the teacher’s favorite students back in high school or anything like that.
AND FINALLY (it’s been a surprisingly big week for reading), I finished Walter Dean Myers’ Scorpions, which is a little bit like watching a trainwreck in slow-motion, and not in a fun way. Jamal’s older brother Randy is in prison for shooting a storeowner with his gang, the Scorpions; Randy’s number two in the gang is trying to get Jamal to take over.
I expected this to end with more corpses than it did, but even though it was less death-y than I expected, the book is still a bummer.
What I’m Reading Now
On the very first page of Fillets of Plaice, Gerald Durrell casually writes, “The cicadas were zithering in the olive trees.” Wouldn’t you die to come up with a description as perfect as cicadas zithering?
What I Plan to Read Next
E. M. Forster’s Maurice! This has been a good year for knocking off books I’ve long meant to read.
What I’ve Just Finished Reading
I read Joan Weigall Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock because I was intrigued by stills from the 1975 movie and the more recent miniseries, and now that I’ve read it, I’m fascinated to know how anyone ever managed to make the darn thing into a movie. It’s so diffuse and purposefully unsatisfying! Three boarding school girls (plus one of the teachers) disappear at Hanging Rock; only one is ever seen again, and she remembers nothing, so there isn’t enough information to even guess what might have happened.
There’s also an ancillary - murder? Suicide? At any rate, death - near the end of the book, although in that case there is at least a strong implication that the headmistress, driven to the breaking point by the stress of the bad publicity following the girls’ disappearance, murdered her youngest pupil under the impression that the girl’s guardian had abandoned her after running up an enormous bill. In fact, the guardian was just beyond the reach of the post office and sent a letter to settle the account as soon as he returned to civilization, which arrived just a few days after the girl’s death. The headmistress then commits suicide by jumping off Hanging Rock. That is just the kind of book this is.
Jim Murphy’s The Great Fire is a Newbery Honor book about, wait for it, the Great Fire of Chicago in 1871. A fast, informative read. I was particularly interested to learn about nineteenth century attitudes toward fires-as-entertainment - as good as a night at the theater, and cheaper, too! - and cutting edge fire-fighting techniques in 1871.
There were six holds on Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting: Five Lives in London Between the Wars, so I powered through to get it back before the due date. It’s renewed my long-standing intention to read more of Virginia Woolf’s work, although, alas, this year I’ve also renewed my long-standing intentions to read E. M. Forster’s Maurice, the rest of James Baldwin’s novels, and the complete works of Mary Renault, so it may be some time before I make any headway on Woolf.
I also read Hiromi Kawakami’s Strange Weather in Tokyo (translated from Japanese by Allison Markin Powell), which I enjoyed despite a VERY misleading cover featuring a girl floating in a convenience store. Reader, there are no floating girls OR convenience stores in this book. Instead it’s a quiet, meditative story about a woman of almost forty who runs into her aging high school Japanese teacher by accident at a bar and the friendship that grows between them and slowly develops into a romance.
I was a little doubtful about the teacher/student aspect of this story, but actually it didn’t end up bothering me at all. The fact that they have this previous acquaintance is the reason they originally speak to each other, but the relationship that develops is very much something new; Tsukiko wasn’t one of the teacher’s favorite students back in high school or anything like that.
AND FINALLY (it’s been a surprisingly big week for reading), I finished Walter Dean Myers’ Scorpions, which is a little bit like watching a trainwreck in slow-motion, and not in a fun way. Jamal’s older brother Randy is in prison for shooting a storeowner with his gang, the Scorpions; Randy’s number two in the gang is trying to get Jamal to take over.
I expected this to end with more corpses than it did, but even though it was less death-y than I expected, the book is still a bummer.
What I’m Reading Now
On the very first page of Fillets of Plaice, Gerald Durrell casually writes, “The cicadas were zithering in the olive trees.” Wouldn’t you die to come up with a description as perfect as cicadas zithering?
What I Plan to Read Next
E. M. Forster’s Maurice! This has been a good year for knocking off books I’ve long meant to read.
no subject
Date: 2020-11-18 01:44 pm (UTC)I found the abuse of poor Sara the most disturbing part of the book by a long shot-- possibly because I wasn't prepared for it at all; possibly because the ambiguously supernatural disappearance of beautiful, rich, white girls has become such a cliche at this point but cruelty towards and neglect of a child is always going to be disturbing?
I also felt bad for Edith :( She was there too! And just... no one remembers that? Or notices her trauma?
Anyway, Mike and Albert were in love and at the end of the book they're totally living happily in North Queensland together, right? Right???
no subject
Date: 2020-11-18 06:37 pm (UTC)The bit where Sara's art teacher writes Sara a note inviting Sara to come live with her, and then Sara never gets it, and everything could have been avoided if only she had! That felt just a little too cruel. Also poor Sara strapped to the backboard and watching immobile as the other girls nearly turn into a frenzied mob when Irma visits the gymnasium.
In conclusion, Sara deserved better.
no subject
Date: 2020-11-18 04:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-11-18 06:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-11-18 10:37 pm (UTC)I had somehow failed to osmose that Picnic at Hanging Rock involved anything as concrete as murder or suicide.
no subject
Date: 2020-11-18 11:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-11-19 05:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-11-19 03:33 pm (UTC)