osprey_archer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer) wrote2021-02-10 11:24 am
osprey_archer) wrote2021-02-10 11:24 am
Wednesday Reading Meme
What I’ve Just Finished Reading
I’m not entirely convinced by the ending of Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow; I think Towles underestimates the difficulty of a fugitive evading capture in the Soviet Union. But on the other hand, the book as a whole is rather soft focus about the darker aspects of the Soviet Union, and Count Alexander Rostov’s escape to the ruins of his childhood home is very much in keeping with the faintly fairy-tale aspect of the story…
...and also I’m telling myself that once he’s done sight-seeing in Nizhny Novgorod, he’s going to escape across the border and make his way to Paris to be reunited with his adoptive daughter Sofia, so it’s not like he’s going to need to evade Soviet state security forever.
Louisa May Alcott’s Work: A Story of Experience is a peculiar, uneven book. The first six chapters are in fact about our heroine Christie leaving home to go out to work. (Her name is a reference to Christiana from Pilgrim’s Progress, which seems to have been Alcott’s ur-book: Little Women also draws from it.) Christie goes through a panoply of nineteenth-century female occupations: servant, actress, governess, companion, seamstress, before settling down as a sort of hired girl with a small family of radical reformers, mother and son, at which point the book switches gears into a romance with the son of the house, a stalwart, noble, manly fellow named David Sterling.
I sometimes feel that Alcott-approved romantic heroes get their personalities crushed out of them with the weight of their own worthiness (Mac in Rose in Bloom becomes much less quirky and interesting once Alcott polishes him up to be worthy of Rose), and I had Doubts about David given that his very name proclaims his worth, but actually I ended up quite liking him; his flaws seemed like real flaws and his past mistakes really and truly mistakes.
Actually, as a twenty-first century reader I was shocked that he was allowed to be a romantic hero after admitting to cruelly refusing to let his sister come home after she had Fallen - embittered, you see, because their frail, elderly father was so shocked by his daughter’s Fall that he died.
But by the time David and Christie marry, he has seen the error in his ways and his sister is home again and the family happily reunited, AND ALSO while she was out in the world Atoning for her fall, she became Christie’s dearest friend and saved her when she was on the brink of drowning herself in the river from sheer despair… which could not have happened if David allowed his sister back home when she first asked… The mysterious workings of providence, etc.
Anyway, David ends up dying heroically in the Civil War, and I wept through the whole chapter as he expires slowly overnight in Christie’s arms. Nineteenth-century novels pull no punches in their death scenes.
What I’m Reading Now
Elizabeth Wein’s The Enigma Game. The book has three rotating first person POVs, and I’m not convinced they’re going to be sufficiently differentiated, but it’s still early days with this book, so I may yet change my mind.
What I Plan to Read Next
I have at last reached the top of the hold queue for Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi!
I’m not entirely convinced by the ending of Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow; I think Towles underestimates the difficulty of a fugitive evading capture in the Soviet Union. But on the other hand, the book as a whole is rather soft focus about the darker aspects of the Soviet Union, and Count Alexander Rostov’s escape to the ruins of his childhood home is very much in keeping with the faintly fairy-tale aspect of the story…
...and also I’m telling myself that once he’s done sight-seeing in Nizhny Novgorod, he’s going to escape across the border and make his way to Paris to be reunited with his adoptive daughter Sofia, so it’s not like he’s going to need to evade Soviet state security forever.
Louisa May Alcott’s Work: A Story of Experience is a peculiar, uneven book. The first six chapters are in fact about our heroine Christie leaving home to go out to work. (Her name is a reference to Christiana from Pilgrim’s Progress, which seems to have been Alcott’s ur-book: Little Women also draws from it.) Christie goes through a panoply of nineteenth-century female occupations: servant, actress, governess, companion, seamstress, before settling down as a sort of hired girl with a small family of radical reformers, mother and son, at which point the book switches gears into a romance with the son of the house, a stalwart, noble, manly fellow named David Sterling.
I sometimes feel that Alcott-approved romantic heroes get their personalities crushed out of them with the weight of their own worthiness (Mac in Rose in Bloom becomes much less quirky and interesting once Alcott polishes him up to be worthy of Rose), and I had Doubts about David given that his very name proclaims his worth, but actually I ended up quite liking him; his flaws seemed like real flaws and his past mistakes really and truly mistakes.
Actually, as a twenty-first century reader I was shocked that he was allowed to be a romantic hero after admitting to cruelly refusing to let his sister come home after she had Fallen - embittered, you see, because their frail, elderly father was so shocked by his daughter’s Fall that he died.
But by the time David and Christie marry, he has seen the error in his ways and his sister is home again and the family happily reunited, AND ALSO while she was out in the world Atoning for her fall, she became Christie’s dearest friend and saved her when she was on the brink of drowning herself in the river from sheer despair… which could not have happened if David allowed his sister back home when she first asked… The mysterious workings of providence, etc.
Anyway, David ends up dying heroically in the Civil War, and I wept through the whole chapter as he expires slowly overnight in Christie’s arms. Nineteenth-century novels pull no punches in their death scenes.
What I’m Reading Now
Elizabeth Wein’s The Enigma Game. The book has three rotating first person POVs, and I’m not convinced they’re going to be sufficiently differentiated, but it’s still early days with this book, so I may yet change my mind.
What I Plan to Read Next
I have at last reached the top of the hold queue for Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi!