osprey_archer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer) wrote2021-03-10 07:48 am
osprey_archer) wrote2021-03-10 07:48 am
Wednesday Reading Meme
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.
“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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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