Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

“Wish eight was for a little box and inside is another box and inside is another box and inside is another box and inside that is an elephant.”

Shirley Jackson’s Nine Magic Wishes is a charming picture book, in which a child receives nine wishes and makes exactly the kind of wishes I would have made when I was eight. Heck, I would probably make these wishes now, although I would feel that I really ought to wish for something that would help people. (Maybe the magician would help me out by insisting the wishes must be charmingly useless.)

I read Kathleen Norris’s The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and “Women’s Work” in the hopes that perhaps I might click with Norris if I gave her work a second chance - not so much that I might find that I agree with her, but that our disagreements might prove productive, that they might provide a new and interesting window on the world even if ultimately not one I adopt for myself.

On the whole this did not prove true, but it wasn’t a futile exercise. This one sentence stuck with me as a crystallization of a lot of my fears about human relationships: “In seeking any covenantal relationship we must be willing to say ‘yes’ long before we have a clear idea of what such intimacy will cost us.”

And I finished Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, which remained beautifully written and very sad (McCourt was not kidding about his terrible childhood!) and I feel like I ought to have something to say about it but, in fact, I do not.

What I’m Reading Now

The worst has happened in Armadale! Both Allan Armadales have fallen in love with Lydia Gwilt! Allan Armadale #2 (alias Ozias Midwinter) has nobly bowed out of the competition without, in fact, ever allowing Allan Armadale #1 to guess there is a competition (you’d think AA#1 might have cottoned on when Midwinter clammed up the moment AA#1 burst into the house yelling “I’M IN LOVE WITH MISS GWILT,” but as Miss Gwilt herself notes, AA#1 is a moron), but I strongly suspect that the narrative will not allow him to get away with it. Midwinter WILL get sucked back into the developing love polygon. He cannot escape.

I’m about halfway through the behemoth that is James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom. The Union has taken New Orleans and half of Tennessee (and maybe could have taken Richmond if McClellan weren’t so useless); the Confederacy, tottering close to despair, has enacted the first ever American conscription law. But it’s only the spring of 1862, so that despair is premature.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve got an interlibrary loan in at the library and I’m pretty sure it’s Joan Lingard’s The File on Fraulein Berg.

Comments

[troisoiseaux]

“Wish eight was for a little box and inside is another box and inside is another box and inside is another box and inside that is an elephant.”

Omg. Is the elephant really tiny or is the box bigger on the inside? (I would absolutely wish for a tiny elephant, although I'd like to think I'd spend wishes 1-7 on, like, world peace and health... although, right now, #7 would probably be to get good grades... wishes 1-6, then. :P)

McCourt was not kidding about his terrible childhood!

I vaguely recall starting Angela's Ashes, because it was on one of my assigned summer reading lists in high school, but I have absolutely no memory of it, so I either gave up quickly or just repressed the memory of it.

[osprey_archer]

Really tiny elephant! There is also a tiny zoo of tiny animals, because Shirley Jackson knows what the people want and it is tiny, tiny things.

I too would probably feel that I ought to wish for world peace etc. - hence the hope that the magician would specify small, useless wishes, so I could wish with a clean conscience for a herd of miniature carousel horses who sleep peacefully in their tiny boxes unless taken out to play.

[asakiyume]

That's a good line from the Kathleen Norris book. We never say yes to anything with full knowledge. ... Well, I mean.... maybe in our choice of dinner item, but not for more complicated things.

[osprey_archer]

Yes, exactly. Not even just for relationships, it's also true for things like career choices or moving somewhere or whatever. Of course you can research these things beforehand so at least you have some idea what you're getting into, but at the end of the day you don't really know how you're going to feel about a thing until you're actually doing it... large choices are always a leap of faith.

[ancientreader]

“In seeking any covenantal relationship we must be willing to say ‘yes’ long before we have a clear idea of what such intimacy will cost us.”

For what it's worth, I'd argue that one also doesn't, at the outset, have a clear idea -- I would say, any idea at all -- of what the intimacy will *bring* one. I certainly didn't -- for one thing, I had no model of a happy marriage to go on. I grant that you have to choose your person(s) wisely, which is an argument for getting to know them well before, as Norris would put it, making a covenant.

Unless she means by "cost" the grief when the relationship ends with the death of one of you. In which case *laughs weakly* yeah, that part is brutal. Source: close friend recently lost her wife of oh about four decades

But much of this would apply to intimate friendship, as well. I've known my two best friends since I was 19 and I quail at the thought of losing either of them.

Battle Cry of Freedom was the first work of Civil War/Civil War-adjacent history I ever read. Do you have others in mind?

[osprey_archer]

It seems to me that the Untold Rewards of Intimacy have a fairly active propaganda machine in Hollywood and the publishing industry, so while one does not go into friendship and/or romance and/or marriage aware of exactly what it will bring, one certainly goes into it under the impression that it is going to bring *something* and that something is going to be more than worth the cost.

And of course sometimes it is - perhaps, on balance, often it is - but on the other hand, the divorce rate indicates that many, many people ultimately decided that it wasn't.

[ancientreader]

Well, you're not wrong about the divorce rate, of course. And, also of course, friendships can end in bitterness and pain. But Hollywood and publishing aside, there does seem to be pretty solid evidence that people who enjoy strong social bonds are healthier and happier than people who don't, and doesn't that suggest that friendship/romance/marriage do, in general, bring *something*? I mean, obviously I have a bias. Or, to put it more kindly, a point of view -- which I have, I think, partly because I was entirely friendless during most of my childhood, so once I developed some close relationships the contrast between having intimacy with other humans, and not having that intimacy, was very sharply apparent indeed. And hence, I suppose, my propagandizing. I AM THE JEHOVAH'S WITNESS OF LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOVE.

ETA: I'm still curious whether you plan to read any more Civil War history, and if so what books you might have in mind. Your reading is always of interest to me especially because it rather rarely overlaps with mine -- so new frontiers, etc.

[osprey_archer]

I think perhaps you read the sentence "This one sentence stuck with me as a crystallization of a lot of my fears about human relationships" and mentally added an addendum that read something like "and that is why I intend to abjure all human companionship henceforth!" and decided that you needed to talk me out of this questionable life plan. This is not, in fact, my life plan. We are basically in agreement that human connection is an important part of a happy life. The quote struck me because it seemed so applicable to a situation with a friend who has spent the last year imploding in a way that I really could not have foreseen back when we became friends in high school, and probably wouldn't have understood if I could have foreseen it.

I'm planning to read Bell Irvin Wiley's The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union and Bruce Catton's Army of the Potomac trilogy, which were published in the 1950s and probably outdated for normal purposes, but exactly what an early 1960s college student might read in order to understand his new Civil War veteran crush who just woke up from a hundred year sleep.

[ancientreader]

Oh dear, no, I thought I was having a mostly theoretical discussion, and now I fear I have offended you, in which case I am very sorry. Please apply post-surgical opioid discount to my ramblings!

[osprey_archer]

I think it was a case of bad timing, really, which there was no way for you to intuit based on what I wrote in the entry. It's just a bit hard to have someone going "ACTUALLY human connection will bring you untold rewards!!!" when you have just come to the glum realization that a particular friendship with a particular person has cost and cost and cost for reasons that you couldn't have foreseen and really wouldn't have understood when you first made it fifteen years ago.

[thisbluespirit]

The worst has happened in Armadale! Both Allan Armadales have fallen in love with Lydia Gwilt! Allan Armadale #2 (alias Ozias Midwinter) has nobly bowed out of the competition without, in fact, ever allowing Allan Armadale #1 to guess there is a competition (you’d think AA#1 might have cottoned on when Midwinter clammed up the moment AA#1 burst into the house yelling “I’M IN LOVE WITH MISS GWILT,” but as Miss Gwilt herself notes, AA#1 is a moron)

I would like to comment sensibly but I am mostly going XD for real here at your Armadale updates.

[osprey_archer]

Wilkie Collins has a true gift for giving me what I expected but somehow making it so much exquisitely painful than I had imagined it would be. Like, he just BRINGS the angst of both AA's falling for Miss Gwilt!

[thisbluespirit]

Like, he just BRINGS the angst of both AA's falling for Miss Gwilt!

Tbf, who wouldn't fall for Miss Gwilt?