Wednesday Reading Meme
Jan. 20th, 2021 07:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
It was curious, but the smell of coffee made me more cheerful. I knew that from the war; it was never the big things that consoled one - it was always the unimportant, the little things.
This is an unusually consoling quote for Erich Maria Remarque’s Three Comrades, which is mostly a chronicle of despair: our hero Robert starts the book on his thirtieth birthday totting up the dead-end jobs he’s held since the end of the Great War, and ends with his girlfriend dying terribly of consumption in his arms. (She might not be literally in his arms. At any rate he is THERE, sitting by the bedside, and remains sitting by her corpse as the dark of the night lightens to dawn.)
Also a few chapters earlier, one of Robert’s friends was shot dead in the street by a Nazi (not actually identified in the text as a Nazi, possibly because the book was published in 1936, after the Nazi Party’s rise to power). A little extra misery! Why not! Beautifully written, evocative misery, but in some ways that’s almost worse, because you can really feel the characters’ despair, seeping down to your bones, like the cold.
I FINALLY read Nora Ellen Groce’s Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness on Martha’s Vineyard, which I’ve meant to read ever since high school because my biology textbook included an excerpt. It was worth the wait: this is a short, engrossing book, which discusses both the likely hereditary pattern behind the high incidence of deafness on Martha’s Vineyard in the 18th and 19th centuries (a recessive gene) and the social consequences of its common occurrence, which was that, well, everyone on Martha’s Vineyard spoke sign language.
The result was that deaf Vineyarders were fully integrated into the community, both socially and economically. Groce’s interlocutors often had difficulty remembering who was deaf, in the way that someone in a modern-day community might have trouble remembering precisely who wore glasses: it’s a fact about someone, but not as important or memorable as “He had that really great fishing boat!”
Deaf Vineyarders married at the same rates as hearing islanders (often to hearing partners), earned their living at the same trades (except whaling, possibly because whaling ships tended to get a large proportion of their crews off-Island?), and had similar economic fates: a few earned their fortunes, most got by, and some sunk into penury, just like their hearing counterparts.
I also read Ruth Stiles Gannett’s My Father’s Dragon, but I didn’t particularly like it. Perhaps the whimsicality of it would have appealed to me more if I’d read it as a youngster?
What I’m Reading Now
I have the horrible feeling that Leo in Mary Renault’s The Friendly Young Ladies is going to end up paired off with Peter, who is the most obnoxious of the available candidates. He makes a habit of pretending to fall in love with his lonely female patients, on the theory that this will cheer them up and speed their recovery; Leo objects (but thinks, as she does so, “he’s a far better human being than I am,” which could only possibly be true if Leo is a serial killer) that women “don’t really enjoy being helped and done good to,” as if Peter is in fact helping and doing good, rather than essentially lying to and misleading these poor women out of, at best, pity, and at worst as a way of amusing himself (Peter would strenuously deny that characterization but it’s absolutely visible in the way he thinks). As if a man would enjoy it if a pretty lady doctor felt so sorry for him that she pretended to fall in love with him till his vital signs bucked up?
What I Plan to Read Next
Is it time for Wilkie Collins’ Armadale? It might be time for Armadale.
It was curious, but the smell of coffee made me more cheerful. I knew that from the war; it was never the big things that consoled one - it was always the unimportant, the little things.
This is an unusually consoling quote for Erich Maria Remarque’s Three Comrades, which is mostly a chronicle of despair: our hero Robert starts the book on his thirtieth birthday totting up the dead-end jobs he’s held since the end of the Great War, and ends with his girlfriend dying terribly of consumption in his arms. (She might not be literally in his arms. At any rate he is THERE, sitting by the bedside, and remains sitting by her corpse as the dark of the night lightens to dawn.)
Also a few chapters earlier, one of Robert’s friends was shot dead in the street by a Nazi (not actually identified in the text as a Nazi, possibly because the book was published in 1936, after the Nazi Party’s rise to power). A little extra misery! Why not! Beautifully written, evocative misery, but in some ways that’s almost worse, because you can really feel the characters’ despair, seeping down to your bones, like the cold.
I FINALLY read Nora Ellen Groce’s Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness on Martha’s Vineyard, which I’ve meant to read ever since high school because my biology textbook included an excerpt. It was worth the wait: this is a short, engrossing book, which discusses both the likely hereditary pattern behind the high incidence of deafness on Martha’s Vineyard in the 18th and 19th centuries (a recessive gene) and the social consequences of its common occurrence, which was that, well, everyone on Martha’s Vineyard spoke sign language.
The result was that deaf Vineyarders were fully integrated into the community, both socially and economically. Groce’s interlocutors often had difficulty remembering who was deaf, in the way that someone in a modern-day community might have trouble remembering precisely who wore glasses: it’s a fact about someone, but not as important or memorable as “He had that really great fishing boat!”
Deaf Vineyarders married at the same rates as hearing islanders (often to hearing partners), earned their living at the same trades (except whaling, possibly because whaling ships tended to get a large proportion of their crews off-Island?), and had similar economic fates: a few earned their fortunes, most got by, and some sunk into penury, just like their hearing counterparts.
I also read Ruth Stiles Gannett’s My Father’s Dragon, but I didn’t particularly like it. Perhaps the whimsicality of it would have appealed to me more if I’d read it as a youngster?
What I’m Reading Now
I have the horrible feeling that Leo in Mary Renault’s The Friendly Young Ladies is going to end up paired off with Peter, who is the most obnoxious of the available candidates. He makes a habit of pretending to fall in love with his lonely female patients, on the theory that this will cheer them up and speed their recovery; Leo objects (but thinks, as she does so, “he’s a far better human being than I am,” which could only possibly be true if Leo is a serial killer) that women “don’t really enjoy being helped and done good to,” as if Peter is in fact helping and doing good, rather than essentially lying to and misleading these poor women out of, at best, pity, and at worst as a way of amusing himself (Peter would strenuously deny that characterization but it’s absolutely visible in the way he thinks). As if a man would enjoy it if a pretty lady doctor felt so sorry for him that she pretended to fall in love with him till his vital signs bucked up?
What I Plan to Read Next
Is it time for Wilkie Collins’ Armadale? It might be time for Armadale.
no subject
Date: 2021-01-20 12:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-01-20 08:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-01-20 01:28 pm (UTC)I had no idea about deafness on Martha's Vineyard--how extremely cool. Was there already a standardized sign language (the way there is now) in the 18th and 19th centuries, or did they speak, so to speak, their own dialect? (And actually, if the latter, did they eventually transition to ASL, or do they still speak their own variant, or both?
**And serially?! How long does he give himself with each patient? Does he go to the funerals of the ones who commit suicide when he leaves them in the lurch?!
no subject
Date: 2021-01-20 08:23 pm (UTC)Renault doesn't mention that he's driven anyone to suicide, though, so either he's been lucky, or he's not as good at making patients fall in love with him as he thinks.
The inhabitants of the Vineyard had a standardized sign language, but it seems to have been used just on the island. Groce notes, however, that students from Martha's Vineyard made up the bulk of the class at the first American school for the deaf, and suggests that the influence of the Vineyard sign language might explain why American Sign Language diverged so swiftly from the French Sign Language that was originally taught at the school.
no subject
Date: 2021-01-21 10:13 pm (UTC)OH NO this sounds amazing.
I loved My Father's Dragon as a kid; I read it again as an adult but I don't remember how I felt about it now, the old love has replaced whatever I thought.
no subject
Date: 2021-01-21 11:54 pm (UTC)My Father's Dragon is the kind of book you have to imprint on as a child, I think1
no subject
Date: 2021-01-24 04:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-01-24 05:01 pm (UTC)