Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

If I didn’t actually believe in my responsibility to tell Americans the truth about Turkey, nevertheless I did feel it was somehow wasteful of me to study Russian literature instead of Turkish literature. I had repeatedly been told in linguistics classes that all languages were universally complex, to a biologically determined degree. Didn’t that mean all languages were, objectively speaking, equally interesting? And I already knew Turkish; it had happened without any work, like a gift, and here I was tossing it away to break my head on a bunch of declensions that came effortlessly to anyone who happened to grow up in Russia.

Today, this strikes me as terrible reasoning. I now understand that love is a rare and valuable thing, and you don’t get to choose its object. You just go around getting hung up on all the least convenient things - and if the only obstacle in your way is a little extra work, then that’s the wonderful gift right there.

Elif Batuman’s The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them spends less time on Russian literature than the title might lead you to expect, but as a memoir it’s wonderful. Whether she’s studying Uzbek in Samarkand or attending a Tolstoy conference as Yasnaya Polyana, she has a gift for meeting oddballs and delighting in absurdities, which makes for a fascinating, digressive, arrestingly peculiar book.

I also finished Carroll Watson Rankin’s Dandelion Cottage. I turned out to be quite wrong in my matchmaking prognostication: it turns out that Mr. Black and Mrs. Crane are brother and sister, estranged for many years, until the Dandelion Cottagers’ dinner party brings the two of them together and they make up their quarrel and agree to keep house together, thus providing lonely Mr. Black with companionship and increasingly infirm Mrs. Crane with security! Happy end for all!

I discovered through Wikipedia that Dandelion Cottage is based on a real house, which does indeed look delightfully cozy, and is a lovely sunshiny yellow as any house called Dandelion Cottage ought to be.

And speaking of cozy house books, I also finished D. E. Stevenson’s Vittoria Cottage, which was a delight. I sometimes think it’s too bad that Miss Buncle’s Book tends to be most people’s entry to Stevenson these days - it’s a delightful book too but much frothier than many of her other books, which are still light in atmosphere but have a bit more heft to them.

This one, for instance - a romance between a mother with grown children and a man rebuilding a life after years away in the war - has a very gentle atmosphere, but the losses and hardships of the war hang in the background. It’s a book about adjusting to a new normal as it becomes clear that the old normal, although it may be approximated in some ways, is never coming back, and as such felt very topical right now, and it was such a pleasure to see the characters trying their best to capture joy.

What I’m Reading Now

I’m about a quarter of the way through Amor Towles’ The Lincoln Highway, a road trip novel set not long after World War II. Our hero Emmett and his little brother Billy have just set out to start a new life in California… only Emmett’s lowlife friends (with hearts of gold) from reform school have just stolen his car, leaving Emmett and Billy STRANDED and PENNILESS (and I strongly suspect the lowlife friends with hearts of gold are going to fecklessly spend all of Emmett’s starting-a-new-life money that was in Emmett’s car when they stole it) and I’m so stressed out about it.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve somehow ended up with THREE trilogies that I’ll need to order through interlibrary loan to complete: D. E. Stevenson’s Vittoria Cottage trilogy, Mary Bard’s Best Friends series, and of course D. K. Broster’s Jacobite Trilogy. (I realize the last is available online, but there are some books that simply demand to be read on paper.) Well, it should keep the interlibrary loan office busy!

Comments

[troisoiseaux]

Whether she’s studying Uzbek in Samarkand or attending a Tolstoy conference as Yasnaya Polyana

I loooooove her essay on the Tolstoy conference. I first encountered it as a free-standing essay online and it was what made me pick up the book!

[osprey_archer]

The part where she lost her luggage and shows up in sweats and sandals and everyone thinks she's a practicing Tolstoyan? Truly beautiful.

[troisoiseaux]

I love the entire premise of "I'm going to write about......... uh............. whether Tolstoy was murdered to get a paid vacation to Russia." Iconic!

[osprey_archer]

The sheer chutzpah of that research proposal is truly something!

[tei]

Yessss, I adore Elif Batuman!

[osprey_archer]

The book was a lot of fun!

[troisoiseaux]

Have you read her novel The Idiot?

[osprey_archer]

I have not. Have you read it? What did you think?

[troisoiseaux]

I have, although it's been a while! I mostly remember a strong sense of second-hand embarrassment, so ymmv. There's a non-zero overlap between The Possessed and The Idiot— it was odd to read the former after the latter and realize that she'd taken some of the scenes verbatim from her memoir.

[osprey_archer]

Oh, boy, if there's a lot of second-hand embarrassment I'll probably give this one a miss. Not my favorite reading experience!

[sovay]

Whether she’s studying Uzbek in Samarkand or attending a Tolstoy conference as Yasnaya Polyana, she has a gift for meeting oddballs and delighting in absurdities, which makes for a fascinating, digressive, arrestingly peculiar book.

It sounds great.

This one, for instance - a romance between a mother with grown children and a man rebuilding a life after years away in the war - has a very gentle atmosphere, but the losses and hardships of the war hang in the background.

This also sounds great! I have never read any D.E. Stevenson. I shall have to see where I can find some.

[osprey_archer]

As troisoiseaux mentions above, in order to get funding for the Yasnaya Polyana conference Batuman writes an extremely inventive grant proposal on the theory that perhaps!!! Tolstoy was POISONED! Classic.

[ladyherenya]

I'm so glad I rediscovered D.E. Stevenson this year! I hope you can get Music in the Hills through interlibrary loans, I really liked that one.

I agree with you that Miss Buncle's Book isn't really representative -- I can see how it initially set me up to approach her other books with the wrong expectations.

Recently I was wondering if anyone today is writing books like Stevenson, or more precisely, is anyone publishing books like hers today (I'm sure someone's writing them) -- and would those "feel" like Stevenson's to me, or if half the appeal Stevenson's descriptions of a bygone era.

[osprey_archer]

Oooh, that's an interesting question! I don't think that I've read any recent books that are like Stevenson's, which might mean they're not being published or might mean I'm not looking in the right places for them.

I do think there's a certain conscious nostalgia in Stevenson: she's writing contemporary-to-her novels, but about a way of life that she knows is on the cusp of changing utterly, and I think that in at least in some of her books she's purposefully chronicling those communities. So for me part of the appeal is definitely Stevenson's description of a bygone era, but part of the reason that description is so detailed and moving is that Stevenson can see that bygoneness coming.

[skygiants]

The Possessed is one of my favorite books that I don't own and really should -- I constantly find myself recommending it to people and then wistfully wishing to reread it myself. The Tolstoy conference will live as a perfect bit of writing in my memory until the end of my days.

I've never read any D.E. Stevenson but now I'm very inclined to!

[osprey_archer]

You SHOULD get a copy of The Possessed! All the better to thrust it into other people's hands with a maniacal gleam in your eye as you cry, "You MUST read this."

D. E. Stevenson is well worth reading!