Wednesday Reading Meme
Feb. 17th, 2021 07:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Gerald Durrell’s Three Tickets to Adventure is a memoir about a collecting expedition in Guyana (then British Guyana), in which I learned, vis-a-vis a photo inset, that young Gerald Durrell was a looker. This is one of Durrell’s earliest books and perhaps less polished than his later work, but still charming. There’s a particularly delightful incident on shipboard, while Durrell is transporting his animal collection back to England, when a pipa toad’s eggs hatch and half a dozen sailors are so enthralled that they more or less act as the pipa toads’ honor guard for the rest of the voyage.
What I’m Reading Now
Onwards in Wilkie Collins’ Armadale! It turns out Ozias Midwinter IS the other Allan Armadale, because of course he is, and now the two Allan Armadales are STRANDED on the VERY SHIP where Ozias Midwinter’s father murdered the father of the other Allan Armadale, who remains entirely unaware of any murderous connection between them! He is therefore very confused as to why his pal Ozias Midwinter has just had a fainting fit, and determined that the only thing for it is to try to make for land on… a makeshift raft made from the mast???
I have a bad feeling about this plan. Hopefully Ozias Midwinter will revive sufficiently before Allan Armadale drowns as a result of his own recklessness?? TUNE IN NEXT WEEK to find out!
I’m also going full steam ahead in Sally Belfrage’s Living with War: A Belfast Year (U.K. title: The Crack: A Belfast Year, partly because this is another interlibrary loan with an absurdly short due date, but also because I knew so little about the Troubles before this book and I feel like I’m learning so much about daily life in Belfast during the Troubles. Less so about the political/religious/historical underpinnings of the conflict, but of course that’s not the point of the book: it’s about the lived experience of war, not the whys and wherefores underpinning it.
I’m making much slower progress in Elizabeth Wein’s The Enigma Game, because it’s not really grabbing me. I keep reading Wein’s books in hopes that there will be another Code Name Verity, which of course is a heavy expectation to lay on any book, but it’s not just that they aren’t Code Name Verity; I’ve really struggled to get into many of her other full-length books, in fact I think all of them except her non-fiction book A Thousand Sisters: The Heroic Airwomen of the Soviet Union in World War II. (I’ve also liked her short books, Firebird and White Eagles.) Possibly I should stop automatically putting her books on my MUST READ list?
What I Plan to Read Next
Can anyone recommend any books about Irish history, or novels set in Ireland that really lean into the setting? Now that I’ve got started with Living with War, I thought I might go on a bit - it seems like the perfect time with St. Patrick’s Day a month away.
It doesn’t need to be a laugh a minute but I’m looking for something more lighthearted than “And then we all died in the potato famine and/or the Troubles.” I’ll read novels steeped in historical tragedy once we stop living in a real time plague.
Gerald Durrell’s Three Tickets to Adventure is a memoir about a collecting expedition in Guyana (then British Guyana), in which I learned, vis-a-vis a photo inset, that young Gerald Durrell was a looker. This is one of Durrell’s earliest books and perhaps less polished than his later work, but still charming. There’s a particularly delightful incident on shipboard, while Durrell is transporting his animal collection back to England, when a pipa toad’s eggs hatch and half a dozen sailors are so enthralled that they more or less act as the pipa toads’ honor guard for the rest of the voyage.
What I’m Reading Now
Onwards in Wilkie Collins’ Armadale! It turns out Ozias Midwinter IS the other Allan Armadale, because of course he is, and now the two Allan Armadales are STRANDED on the VERY SHIP where Ozias Midwinter’s father murdered the father of the other Allan Armadale, who remains entirely unaware of any murderous connection between them! He is therefore very confused as to why his pal Ozias Midwinter has just had a fainting fit, and determined that the only thing for it is to try to make for land on… a makeshift raft made from the mast???
I have a bad feeling about this plan. Hopefully Ozias Midwinter will revive sufficiently before Allan Armadale drowns as a result of his own recklessness?? TUNE IN NEXT WEEK to find out!
I’m also going full steam ahead in Sally Belfrage’s Living with War: A Belfast Year (U.K. title: The Crack: A Belfast Year, partly because this is another interlibrary loan with an absurdly short due date, but also because I knew so little about the Troubles before this book and I feel like I’m learning so much about daily life in Belfast during the Troubles. Less so about the political/religious/historical underpinnings of the conflict, but of course that’s not the point of the book: it’s about the lived experience of war, not the whys and wherefores underpinning it.
I’m making much slower progress in Elizabeth Wein’s The Enigma Game, because it’s not really grabbing me. I keep reading Wein’s books in hopes that there will be another Code Name Verity, which of course is a heavy expectation to lay on any book, but it’s not just that they aren’t Code Name Verity; I’ve really struggled to get into many of her other full-length books, in fact I think all of them except her non-fiction book A Thousand Sisters: The Heroic Airwomen of the Soviet Union in World War II. (I’ve also liked her short books, Firebird and White Eagles.) Possibly I should stop automatically putting her books on my MUST READ list?
What I Plan to Read Next
Can anyone recommend any books about Irish history, or novels set in Ireland that really lean into the setting? Now that I’ve got started with Living with War, I thought I might go on a bit - it seems like the perfect time with St. Patrick’s Day a month away.
It doesn’t need to be a laugh a minute but I’m looking for something more lighthearted than “And then we all died in the potato famine and/or the Troubles.” I’ll read novels steeped in historical tragedy once we stop living in a real time plague.
