Wednesday Reading Meme
Mar. 10th, 2021 07:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat 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.
no subject
Date: 2021-03-10 02:19 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2021-03-10 04:52 pm (UTC)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.