Wednesday Reading Meme
Dec. 8th, 2021 08:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
GUESS WHO FINISHED MARY RENAULT’S FIRE FROM HEAVEN, IT’S ME, A REVIEW WILL BE FORTHCOMING BUT FOR NOW *SPIKES FOOTBALL*
Otherwise! This week I read Viv Groskop’s The Anna Karenina Fix: Life Lessons from Russian Literature, which reminds me of a blog in the best possible way: informal yet erudite, hilarious and yet hitting notes of poignancy, as when she muses on unrequited love in Turgenev’s life and work, as well as her own unrequited passion for a certain Bogdan Bogdanovich, which translates as “God’s Gift, Son of God’s Gift.” (She muses on an oversize sweater she liked to wear the year that she knew him: “it made me look like a bag lady. You can see now why the passion of God’s Gift, Son of Gift’s Gift, was not ignited.”)
This book also absolutely exploded my reading list, adding not only many of the Russian classics that it discussed, but also J. A. E. Curtis’s biography Manuscripts Don’t Burn: Mikhail Bulgakov, A Life in Letters and Diaries, and...
Alex Beam’s The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson and the End of a Beautiful Friendship, a book about Nabokov and Wilson’s friendship-ending quarrel over Nabokov’s translation of Eugene Onegin. Wilson wrote a 6,000 word essay panning the translation, and then he and Nabokov argued about it across at least three different literary magazines, with articles on either side contributed by such luminaries as Robert Graves, Paul Fussell, and the Harvard professor Alexander Gerschenkron, who panned Nabokov’s translation so eruditely that Nabokov, who usually sailed into battle with each and every critic, ignored the letter completely, presumably because he couldn’t refute it. (Then he meekly incorporated most of Gerschenkron’s suggestions into the next edition.)
In short, this is an account of an incredibly highbrow fandom wank in the pre-internet age, and I ate it up with a spoon. An absolute delight.
What I’m Reading Now
Another Alex Beam book, of course: A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books, which unexpectedly, like The Feud, turns out to center on a friendship, although in this case the friendship does not turn sour, as only one of the friends (Mortimer Adler) is impossible. The other, Robert Hutchins, Boy Wonder, dean of the Yale Law School at the age of 27, was beloved by all who knew him: “Hutchins ‘made homosexuals of us all’ was his friend Scott Buchanan’s memorable comment,” Beam notes, after quoting a different friend who raves that Hutchins was “humorous, ironic, brave, beautiful, unflappable, dismissive of cant…” and then runs out of adjectives, not because there are no more adjectives but because no mere word can capture the glory and the wonder that is Robert Hutchins.
Beam includes a photo of Hutchins, and the man looks like an Arrow Collar ad. A 1935 Time magazine story gushed that Hutchins, “once the youngest and handsomest big-university president in the land, is now only the handsomest.” Hutchins teased Adler about teaching too much Thomas Aquinas, “lest auld Aquinas be forgot.” I’m thinking about falling in love with Hutchins myself.
What I Plan to Read Next
I have one last Newbery Honor book from the 1980s! It’s Robin McKinley’s The Blue Sword, which I tried valiantly to read in my youth (one of my friends really liked it) and bounced off of repeatedly. Perhaps the third time’s the charm?
GUESS WHO FINISHED MARY RENAULT’S FIRE FROM HEAVEN, IT’S ME, A REVIEW WILL BE FORTHCOMING BUT FOR NOW *SPIKES FOOTBALL*
Otherwise! This week I read Viv Groskop’s The Anna Karenina Fix: Life Lessons from Russian Literature, which reminds me of a blog in the best possible way: informal yet erudite, hilarious and yet hitting notes of poignancy, as when she muses on unrequited love in Turgenev’s life and work, as well as her own unrequited passion for a certain Bogdan Bogdanovich, which translates as “God’s Gift, Son of God’s Gift.” (She muses on an oversize sweater she liked to wear the year that she knew him: “it made me look like a bag lady. You can see now why the passion of God’s Gift, Son of Gift’s Gift, was not ignited.”)
This book also absolutely exploded my reading list, adding not only many of the Russian classics that it discussed, but also J. A. E. Curtis’s biography Manuscripts Don’t Burn: Mikhail Bulgakov, A Life in Letters and Diaries, and...
Alex Beam’s The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson and the End of a Beautiful Friendship, a book about Nabokov and Wilson’s friendship-ending quarrel over Nabokov’s translation of Eugene Onegin. Wilson wrote a 6,000 word essay panning the translation, and then he and Nabokov argued about it across at least three different literary magazines, with articles on either side contributed by such luminaries as Robert Graves, Paul Fussell, and the Harvard professor Alexander Gerschenkron, who panned Nabokov’s translation so eruditely that Nabokov, who usually sailed into battle with each and every critic, ignored the letter completely, presumably because he couldn’t refute it. (Then he meekly incorporated most of Gerschenkron’s suggestions into the next edition.)
In short, this is an account of an incredibly highbrow fandom wank in the pre-internet age, and I ate it up with a spoon. An absolute delight.
What I’m Reading Now
Another Alex Beam book, of course: A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books, which unexpectedly, like The Feud, turns out to center on a friendship, although in this case the friendship does not turn sour, as only one of the friends (Mortimer Adler) is impossible. The other, Robert Hutchins, Boy Wonder, dean of the Yale Law School at the age of 27, was beloved by all who knew him: “Hutchins ‘made homosexuals of us all’ was his friend Scott Buchanan’s memorable comment,” Beam notes, after quoting a different friend who raves that Hutchins was “humorous, ironic, brave, beautiful, unflappable, dismissive of cant…” and then runs out of adjectives, not because there are no more adjectives but because no mere word can capture the glory and the wonder that is Robert Hutchins.
Beam includes a photo of Hutchins, and the man looks like an Arrow Collar ad. A 1935 Time magazine story gushed that Hutchins, “once the youngest and handsomest big-university president in the land, is now only the handsomest.” Hutchins teased Adler about teaching too much Thomas Aquinas, “lest auld Aquinas be forgot.” I’m thinking about falling in love with Hutchins myself.
What I Plan to Read Next
I have one last Newbery Honor book from the 1980s! It’s Robin McKinley’s The Blue Sword, which I tried valiantly to read in my youth (one of my friends really liked it) and bounced off of repeatedly. Perhaps the third time’s the charm?
no subject
Date: 2021-12-08 02:29 pm (UTC)Ooh, putting that one on my list. Have you read Elif Batuman's The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them?
I’m thinking about falling in love with Hutchins myself.
He's hot AND he likes puns? He might as well be walking around with a sign that says FALL IN LOVE WITH ME.
no subject
Date: 2021-12-08 02:54 pm (UTC)Maybe?? I feel like a few years ago I read someone's Russian Literature Memoir, and I thought it might have been the Groskop book but it wasn't, and it might be The Possessed but it probably isn't, and possibly I haven't read ANY books of this type before, and I only think I did because I definitely read a few books like this about Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, etc.
I wonder if someone has written a literary memoir about My Life in Les Miserables or Possibly French Literature More Generally. I should look into that. I'd read it.
I don't know that my love for Hutchins will be as deep and abiding as my love for Josephine Preston Peabody, but I am prepared to luxuriate in a crush for the length of this book!
no subject
Date: 2021-12-08 05:23 pm (UTC)Considering there is, if you squint, a fairly linear sequence of cause and effect between me reading Les Mis at 14 and ending up in law school at 24, maybe I'll end up writing it in a couple of decades. The less said about my Les Mis fandom experience of 2012-2016, the better, though...
no subject
Date: 2021-12-08 07:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-08 05:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-08 05:52 pm (UTC)Ooh that Groskop book sounds good.
no subject
Date: 2021-12-08 07:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-08 08:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-08 08:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-08 08:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-08 06:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-08 07:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-08 07:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-08 07:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-08 10:07 pm (UTC)The Blue Sword is actually one of my absolute favourite books, and fairly formative in my love of fantasy, though I haven’t read it since I was a teen so
I’m prepared to believe it hasn’t aged super well.
no subject
Date: 2021-12-08 10:17 pm (UTC)My recollection is that as a child I found McKinley's prose style challenging to understand (why? Who even knows), so THAT at least ought to be less of a problem now.
no subject
Date: 2021-12-09 11:36 am (UTC)I loved The Blue Sword as a teenager and then went on to read most of McKinley's other books but I don't know if I would like them now. Hopefully you have the opposite experience!
no subject
Date: 2021-12-09 01:33 pm (UTC)I've read a number of McKinley's other books with pleasure (Sunshine, Beauty, Rose Daughter) although not admittedly with great retention afterward, so hopefully I will enjoy The Blue Sword!