Wednesday Reading Meme
Feb. 9th, 2022 07:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
I’ve been on a bit of a graphic novel kick recently, which I continued with Besties: Working It Out, cowritten by Kayla Miller & Jeffrey Canino and illustrated by Kristina Luu. I’ve complained about some of Miller’s choices in her past books (although it hasn’t stopped me from reading each new book as it comes out!), so I was surprised that I just straight up liked this one. Possibly bouncing ideas off a cowriter and illustrator softened some of the weirder edges off Miller’s ideas about How Friendships Work.
The best friends in this are Beth and Chanda, two friends who get a dogsitting job so Beth can buy her mother a birthday present and Chanda can convince her parents that she’s responsible enough to get a pet cat. Naturally, things don’t go quite smoothly… I love this snapshot of a pre-teen friendship: they have so much fun together, and their friendship is strong enough to mend after they get into a big fight.
I also finished my Alex Beam journey with his first book, Gracefully Insane: Life and Death in America’s Premier Mental Hospital, which chock full of interesting anecdotes about the history of psychiatry. It focuses particularly on anything related to the McLean Hospital in Massachusetts (the last resort of Boston Brahmins in mental distress), although Beam ranges more widely at times, as in telling the tale of Freud’s disciple Dr. Horace Frink, who also became Freud’s patient, which resulted in a spectacularly botched psychoanalysis.
Frink had fallen in love with one of his own patients, a wealthy married woman named Angie Bijur. Frink himself was also married, but Freud nonetheless encouraged the pair to leave their respective spouses, marry each other, and then give a large amount of money to Freud, as he explains in this arrestingly bizarre letter to Frink (Freud, you understand, had diagnosed Frink with unconscious homosexuality): “Your complaint that you cannot grasp your homosexuality implies that you are not yet aware of your phantasy of making me a rich man. If matters turn out all right [that is, if Frink and Mrs. Bijur marry] let us change the imaginary gift into a real contribution to the psychoanalytic fund.”
What I’m Reading Now
After MUCH TRAVAIL I figured out how to play audiobooks on Overdrive through my iPod, so now I’m listening to Mrs. Pollifax and the Lion Killer, which the library CRUELLY refused to buy as a regular ebook. Mrs. Pollifax’s friend Kedi has just been ATTACKED IN THE PALACE GARDEN!
I’ve also begun Sylvia Townshend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them, a book about nuns in the Middle Ages. The Black Death has just passed and now the remaining peasants want better wages for their labor! THE AUDACITY.
What I Plan to Read Next
I’ve been organizing my book tag and stumbled on a recommendation for another nun book, Gail Godwin’s Unfinished Desires. Has anyone read this? How did you feel about it?
I’ve been on a bit of a graphic novel kick recently, which I continued with Besties: Working It Out, cowritten by Kayla Miller & Jeffrey Canino and illustrated by Kristina Luu. I’ve complained about some of Miller’s choices in her past books (although it hasn’t stopped me from reading each new book as it comes out!), so I was surprised that I just straight up liked this one. Possibly bouncing ideas off a cowriter and illustrator softened some of the weirder edges off Miller’s ideas about How Friendships Work.
The best friends in this are Beth and Chanda, two friends who get a dogsitting job so Beth can buy her mother a birthday present and Chanda can convince her parents that she’s responsible enough to get a pet cat. Naturally, things don’t go quite smoothly… I love this snapshot of a pre-teen friendship: they have so much fun together, and their friendship is strong enough to mend after they get into a big fight.
I also finished my Alex Beam journey with his first book, Gracefully Insane: Life and Death in America’s Premier Mental Hospital, which chock full of interesting anecdotes about the history of psychiatry. It focuses particularly on anything related to the McLean Hospital in Massachusetts (the last resort of Boston Brahmins in mental distress), although Beam ranges more widely at times, as in telling the tale of Freud’s disciple Dr. Horace Frink, who also became Freud’s patient, which resulted in a spectacularly botched psychoanalysis.
Frink had fallen in love with one of his own patients, a wealthy married woman named Angie Bijur. Frink himself was also married, but Freud nonetheless encouraged the pair to leave their respective spouses, marry each other, and then give a large amount of money to Freud, as he explains in this arrestingly bizarre letter to Frink (Freud, you understand, had diagnosed Frink with unconscious homosexuality): “Your complaint that you cannot grasp your homosexuality implies that you are not yet aware of your phantasy of making me a rich man. If matters turn out all right [that is, if Frink and Mrs. Bijur marry] let us change the imaginary gift into a real contribution to the psychoanalytic fund.”
What I’m Reading Now
After MUCH TRAVAIL I figured out how to play audiobooks on Overdrive through my iPod, so now I’m listening to Mrs. Pollifax and the Lion Killer, which the library CRUELLY refused to buy as a regular ebook. Mrs. Pollifax’s friend Kedi has just been ATTACKED IN THE PALACE GARDEN!
I’ve also begun Sylvia Townshend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them, a book about nuns in the Middle Ages. The Black Death has just passed and now the remaining peasants want better wages for their labor! THE AUDACITY.
What I Plan to Read Next
I’ve been organizing my book tag and stumbled on a recommendation for another nun book, Gail Godwin’s Unfinished Desires. Has anyone read this? How did you feel about it?
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Date: 2022-02-09 04:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-09 06:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-09 07:25 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2022-02-10 04:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-10 01:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-10 05:37 pm (UTC)WHAT. (ETA: And wait, why tell him he was homosexual and also had to marry a woman??)
Sylvia Townshend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them
Yes, good! \o/
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Date: 2022-02-10 06:16 pm (UTC)I suspect Freud diagnosed Frink with unconscious homosexuality specifically for the purpose of pushing Frink into this marriage which would enable Frink to give Freud a lot of money.
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Date: 2022-02-10 06:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-10 07:07 pm (UTC)