Wednesday Reading Meme
Feb. 3rd, 2021 07:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold, a quiet yet absorbing SF novel about a little coffee shop in an alley in Tokyo where one of the seats can transport a patron through time. But there are rules: nothing the time traveler does will change the present; once they’re in the past, they must stay in the seat; and they have to finish their visit before their coffee grows cold, or they will remain in the seat as a ghost.
If the book had placed more weight on that last rule it could have turned toward horror, but the author instead focuses on the intimate, emotional aspects of these journeys. Although time travelers can’t change anything that happened - if someone died, they will stay dead - their trips through time can change their attitude toward what has happened and their behavior in the future.
I also read Katherine May’s Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, in which May argues that our current cultural expectation (May is writing from England, but this is true in America too; possibly this is an Anglophone thing?) that constant happiness is possible is not only false but fundamentally damaging, because it makes people feel alone and broken when they meet with life’s inevitable sadnesses, when really what they are going through is as inevitable as the winter in temperate climes.
You will be unsurprised to hear that I agree with this thesis whole-heartedly. I thought the book would have been improved if May cut down on the excursions into memoir by about two-thirds, though. This is my perennial complaint about modern nonfiction. If the book isn’t actually meant to be a memoir, then adding memoir very rarely adds anything.
Here is a quote that I liked, though, from one of the non-memoir portions, when May muses about the widespread human tendency to project the qualities about ourselves that we like least onto wolves: “In the depths of our winters, we are all wolfish. We want in the archaic sense of the word, as if we are lacking something and need to absorb it in order to be whole again.”
What I’m Reading Now
“Why didn’t anyone tell me about Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow?” I was going to complain, but actually I am glad no one did, as I think I’m reading this book at exactly the right time. It’s a slow-moving (yet absorbing) book about a Russian count whom a Bolshevik court sentences to life imprisonment in the Metropol Hotel, and how he finds meaning and interest in his life within those confines. A good read for pandemic times, when many of us are finding ourselves living (at least for the moment) more confined lives than we anticipated.
I also started reading Louisa May Alcott’s Work, because it was in the same collection as Diana and Persis and I did not realize that the collection only included the first six chapters, plus the concluding chapter. Why! Why would you print only a part of the book like that? Fortunately ebooks exist, but I cannot IMAGINE how frustrating it would be to have read this in the pre-ebook days of 1988, when the collection was published, and discover that there are THIRTEEN CHAPTERS MISSING.
Last but not least, I’m continuing on in Wilkie Collins’ Armadale. Allan Armadale (1) has just become fast friends with a mysterious stranger who (as Collins gleefully points out) MIGHT be Allan Armadale (2).Would Collins really have the face to lampshade the possibility if the mysterious stranger really IS Allan Armadale (2)? MAYBE. I certainly wouldn’t put it past him.
What I Plan to Read Next
I’m finally getting Elizabeth Wein’s The Enigma Game!!!! And Micah Nemerever’s These Violent Delights will be arriving around the same time. WHAT DO. I feel the library could have staggered the book’s arrival more effectively…
Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold, a quiet yet absorbing SF novel about a little coffee shop in an alley in Tokyo where one of the seats can transport a patron through time. But there are rules: nothing the time traveler does will change the present; once they’re in the past, they must stay in the seat; and they have to finish their visit before their coffee grows cold, or they will remain in the seat as a ghost.
If the book had placed more weight on that last rule it could have turned toward horror, but the author instead focuses on the intimate, emotional aspects of these journeys. Although time travelers can’t change anything that happened - if someone died, they will stay dead - their trips through time can change their attitude toward what has happened and their behavior in the future.
I also read Katherine May’s Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, in which May argues that our current cultural expectation (May is writing from England, but this is true in America too; possibly this is an Anglophone thing?) that constant happiness is possible is not only false but fundamentally damaging, because it makes people feel alone and broken when they meet with life’s inevitable sadnesses, when really what they are going through is as inevitable as the winter in temperate climes.
You will be unsurprised to hear that I agree with this thesis whole-heartedly. I thought the book would have been improved if May cut down on the excursions into memoir by about two-thirds, though. This is my perennial complaint about modern nonfiction. If the book isn’t actually meant to be a memoir, then adding memoir very rarely adds anything.
Here is a quote that I liked, though, from one of the non-memoir portions, when May muses about the widespread human tendency to project the qualities about ourselves that we like least onto wolves: “In the depths of our winters, we are all wolfish. We want in the archaic sense of the word, as if we are lacking something and need to absorb it in order to be whole again.”
What I’m Reading Now
“Why didn’t anyone tell me about Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow?” I was going to complain, but actually I am glad no one did, as I think I’m reading this book at exactly the right time. It’s a slow-moving (yet absorbing) book about a Russian count whom a Bolshevik court sentences to life imprisonment in the Metropol Hotel, and how he finds meaning and interest in his life within those confines. A good read for pandemic times, when many of us are finding ourselves living (at least for the moment) more confined lives than we anticipated.
I also started reading Louisa May Alcott’s Work, because it was in the same collection as Diana and Persis and I did not realize that the collection only included the first six chapters, plus the concluding chapter. Why! Why would you print only a part of the book like that? Fortunately ebooks exist, but I cannot IMAGINE how frustrating it would be to have read this in the pre-ebook days of 1988, when the collection was published, and discover that there are THIRTEEN CHAPTERS MISSING.
Last but not least, I’m continuing on in Wilkie Collins’ Armadale. Allan Armadale (1) has just become fast friends with a mysterious stranger who (as Collins gleefully points out) MIGHT be Allan Armadale (2).Would Collins really have the face to lampshade the possibility if the mysterious stranger really IS Allan Armadale (2)? MAYBE. I certainly wouldn’t put it past him.
What I Plan to Read Next
I’m finally getting Elizabeth Wein’s The Enigma Game!!!! And Micah Nemerever’s These Violent Delights will be arriving around the same time. WHAT DO. I feel the library could have staggered the book’s arrival more effectively…
no subject
Date: 2021-02-04 03:26 pm (UTC)I agree with you about cutting down on memoir in nonfiction; we've talked about that. It sounds cruel, but really, if I'm interested in X topic, then that's what I want to read about, not about the writer's feelings and encounters with X, unless they're somehow material to the topic, and really the materiality drops MARKEDLY when the writer starts talking about their divorce and whatever (unless the topic is divorces, I guess). Relatedly, I feel a little bit that way about knowing personal stuff about people whose fiction I read. It's different if I already knew the person personally (as with you, say!), but if I know *nothing* about the person and have enjoyed their writing, sometimes it just feels strange to learn about them as a person. It kind of adds freight to the reading experience that I don't particularly want.
no subject
Date: 2021-02-04 07:30 pm (UTC)A Gentleman in Moscow is fiction. (I nearly went on, but on second thought I'll save those further comments for next week's Wednesday Reading Meme.)
The funny thing is that I LOVE memoirs, provided that I'm expecting the book to be a memoir. You'd think that would make me more forgiving when excess memoir crops up in nonfiction that is supposedly about North Korean film history or whatever, but in fact no. Of course, if you pick up a memoir, you have control over what type it is: if you pick up a divorce memoir, you know what you're getting into, it's not going to blindside you like picking up that North Korean film history book and, oh, okay, I guess we're going to talk about the author's failing marriage for ten pages now...
Also, writing about oneself actually seems to be a tricky skill. You'd think it would be a piece of cake - the definition of writing what you know! - but people are often so close to the topic, they don't seem to realize that readers will not find the author's failing marriage intrinsically interesting.
no subject
Date: 2021-02-04 07:55 pm (UTC)"What did you learn about North Korean film from that book?"
"Not sure, but I *did* learn that snooping through someone's texts is bad for building trust but good for revealing secret liaisons"