Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

AT LONG LAST I have finished Wilkie Collins’ Armadale! It probably would not have taken so long, but honestly I found the suspense so stressful that I often had to take breaks before I could go on… Perhaps not what you’d expect from a book that’s 150 years old, but what can I say, Wilkie Collins knows his craft.



In the end, Lydia Gwilt plots to trap Allan Armadale in a room that will fill with a poisonous gas… only to realize at the last moment that her beloved husband has taken Allan’s place, and might at this very moment be breathing his last among the noxious air! She rushes into the room, drags his unconscious body out, kisses his face until she sees signs of life… and then writes him a little suicide note, which she leaves folded in his still-unconscious hand as she steps nobly into the poisonous chamber herself.

I was hoping against hope for a happy ending for everyone, even Lydia Gwilt, but I accept that this was unlikely. If vague signs of her husband’s waning interest (which are maybe just signs that he is busy with his work?) are enough to drive her to inheritance fraud and murder, probably nothing was going to keep her on the strait and narrow. At least Ozias Midwinter, Super Woobie, escapes alive and even surprisingly unharmed in spirit (possibly the fact that Lydia loved him enough to save him buoys him?), which is what I really cared about most.



After Armadale, I wanted something short to read as a palate cleanser, so I read Paula Fox’s One-Eyed Cat, in which a boy in upper New York in the 1930s gets an air rifle for his birthday, which his father forbids him to use… but the boy sneaks it out that night and shoots at a moving shadow - or maybe not a shadow? - it was really too dark to say, but when he sees a one-eyed cat later, he becomes convinced he shot that cat. Some lovely nature descriptions and a lovely picture of his relationship with his mother, who suffers from severe rheumatoid arthritis.

I also zoomed through Gerald Durrell’s The Whispering Land, in which Durrell travels to Argentina to film penguins and seals and gather specimens for his zoo, including “an orange-rumped agouti, a large rodent with dark eyes, slender legs and the disposition of a racehorse suffering from an acute nervous breakdown.” A jolly romp, like all of Durrell’s books. I also particularly enjoyed this description of trying to book passage home for a collection of animals:

Most shipping people, when you mention the words “animal cargo” to them grow pale, and get vivid mental pictures of the Captain being eviscerated on the bridge by a jaguar, the First Officer being slowly crushed in the coils of some enormous snake, while the passengers are pursued from one end of the ship to the other by a host of repulsive and deadly beasts of various species.

What I’m Reading Now

lucymonster recommended Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad and I’ve started reading it because I’m weak for all things Soviet… But it may take me some time to finish it, because the Soviet Union keeps losing entire armies because Stalin refuses to allow them to retreat, and then the Nazis encircle YET ANOTHER SOVIET ARMY and I shriek “WHY? WHY? WHY?” (this is a cry of existential angst rather than a request for clarification) and then I have to take a little break to read something else.

I’ve also been reading Monika Zgustova’s Dressed for a Dance in the Snow: Women’s Voices from the Gulag. I plan to write a longer review (or at least post a selection of quotes), but here’s one for the road. In 1950, Susanna Pechuro recalls, one of her teachers condemned a classmate’s poem as anti-Soviet:

“Don’t you see it’s sad? Some feelings are not meant for Soviet youth.”

“But we’re all sad sometimes,” I objected.

“Soviet youth should never be. Sadness is decadent,” the teacher cut me off.

This is five years after the end of World War II, in which those entire armies kept getting destroyed. But no sadness! Sadness is decadent, comrades!

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m back in the saddle with the Newbery Honor project. I’ve got seven books from the 90s left to go, plus the five (!) Newbery Honor books from this year.

Comments

[asakiyume]

Wow, I am mad impressed that poisonous gas as a manipulable substance available for antagonists was already present in the 1860s! I mean, clearly people have known about poisonous gases for, well, forever, from things like volcanoes and coal mines, but to be able to deploy them as weapons--I would have thought we needed World War I for that.

To tell a Russian that sadness is decadent feels like some grade-A level self-hate, frankly.

[osprey_archer]

This is a poisonous gas that is created by mixing two chemicals together, and you've gotta trap your subject in an ill-ventilated room for about half an hour for it to work, so it's not quite up there with mustard gas. But certainly a precursor!

There are times when I feel that the Bolsheviks would have found Americans temperamentally better suited for their revolution, and the whole "sadness is decadent!" thing is definitely one of those times. Americans would eat that up like candy!

[asakiyume]

They sure would! Americans lack a Russian soul... they have a Bolshevik one--at least on the decadence of sadness (not so much on the redistribution of the means of production...)

[osprey_archer]

Yes, clearly there would need to be some fine-tuning, but goodness knows the Bolsheviks never let the population's lack of enthusiasm get in their way of a little revoluting.

[asakiyume]

the Bolsheviks never let the population's lack of enthusiasm get in their way of a little revoluting. --I laughed out loud and read our whole thread to Wakanomori.

[thisbluespirit]

In the end, Lydia Gwilt plots to trap Allan Armadale in a room that will fill with a poisonous gas… only to realize at the last moment that her beloved husband has taken Allan’s place, and might at this very moment be breathing his last among the noxious air! She rushes into the room, drags his unconscious body out, kisses his face until she sees signs of life… and then writes him a little suicide note, which she leaves folded in his still-unconscious hand as she steps nobly into the poisonous chamber herself.

I am vague on a lot else now at this point in time, but not on this! Sinister bottle of purple substances! Oh, Lydia. She loves murder too much, it's true. But, yes. DRAMA! I do love Wilkie Collins. I did this massive classics binge as a teenager and getting hold of the Woman In White was a game-changer in so many ways. And obv I read what else I could of his. (The 'big four' are Woman In White, The Moonstone, Armadale, & No Name. (No Name is the tale of two sisters who are Wronged, and one of them is good about it and the other - called Magdalen obv - decides Revenge Is the Way, except her plot for revenge is obstructed by a super sinister housekeeper who keeps a pet toad.)

[osprey_archer]

Collins is Very Weird about women and I tremble slightly to see what he does with sisters (actually, isn't Woman in White about sisters, too?), but a sinister housekeeper with a pet toad IS a strong draw...

[thisbluespirit]

The Woman in White is, Marian and Laura, but I was just assuming you'd read that, sorry. Usually people don't get to Armadale before it!

19th C writers are always weird about women; Wilkie Collins a lot less so than many of them, I think.

[osprey_archer]

I have been informed that The Woman in White is the Best and therefore have been saving it because I didn't want the rest of Collins to feel like a letdown afterwards.

[thisbluespirit]

I don't know if that's true? I think, technically, The Moonstone most likely is. TWiW is the earliest, so has more problems (certainly re. female characters). However, it is a huge amount of fun otherwise, especially villain narrative POV. But, yeah. I'm glad I read it first. (She says, soooo unhelpfully. :lol:)

[rachelmanija]

I adore The Whispering Land.

[osprey_archer]

It's hard to get better than penguins!

[lucymonster]

But it may take me some time to finish it, because the Soviet Union keeps losing entire armies because Stalin refuses to allow them to retreat, and then the Nazis encircle YET ANOTHER SOVIET ARMY and I shriek “WHY? WHY? WHY?” (this is a cry of existential angst rather than a request for clarification) and then I have to take a little break to read something else.

Hah, despite being the person who recced it, this is very accurate to my experience of the book. If it helps, by about 2/3 of the way through you'll have stopped shrieking "WHY? WHY? WHY?" at Stalin and be shrieking it at Hitler instead.

[osprey_archer]

OH GOOD, equal opportunity WHY WHY WHYs. Just what you want to scream at the participants when you are reading about a battle.

I'm already doing lowercase "why"s at Hitler as his expectations for conquest in the Caucasus keep ballooning to encompass more and more territory... even as he shifts troops away to send them to Leningrad. I don't know much about military strategy, but even I can see that this is a bad idea.