Wednesday Reading Meme
Apr. 27th, 2022 07:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Tales of the City Room, recommended byskygiants as “a collection of short stories by 19th-century Lady Journalist Elizabeth Garver Jordan about the Experience of being a 19th-century Lady Journalist.” Honestly I should just link her review as it hits all the high points of the collection, which high points generally involve Lady Journalist Ruth Herrick forming intense connections with dreamy murderesses/nuns/dissolute Spanish dancers/etc. (There is also, for variety, one story where she meets a dreamy mountain youth.)
I enjoyed this very much, and also very much enjoyed all the little details about life working on a major newspaper in the 1890s. Jordan worked in a newspaper herself and clearly watched her surroundings with a keen and affectionate eye.
What I’m Reading Now
I’ve taken the plunge on Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness! Will probably post about it at more length (perhaps in conjunction with Compton Mackenzie’s Extraordinary Women), but for now I wish to note that our heroine Stephen’s father (he and his wife actually named their daughter Stephen because they wanted a boy so much. This may be Hall’s theory about Why Lesbians), despite reading and rereading the sexologist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs ever since Stephen was about seven, does not manage to tell either his wife OR his daughter about his suspicions before he dies when Steven is eighteen. Buddy! Pal! Dude!
And I continue very slowly through Bruce Catton’s A Stillness at Appomattox, because Catton (justly!) wants to make sure that we feel the full horror of the wounded men screaming in the Wilderness as the fire creeps through the underbrush to burn them alive, and there is only so much of that I can take at one time. However I wish to report this incident as merely the latest illustration of my theory that the entire Union Army was born in a born: as the army made its way from the Wilderness to Spotsylvania Court House, a weary regiment of Pennsylvania cavalry ran into a rookie cavalry regiment with fresh mounts and decided that the middle of the night! during a running battle! was the right time to steal horses from, I cannot emphasize this enough, a regiment in their own army.
The two Union cavalry regiments brawled over the horses for an entire hour, during which time they completely snarled up the Union advance, which allowed the Confederate Army to get to Spotsylvania Court House first and dig in. Good going my dudes!
What I Plan to Read Next
It turns out that Elizabeth Garver Jordan also wrote (Tales of the Cloister), a book about NUNS. I am all about nuns! Clearly I must read it.
Tales of the City Room, recommended by
skygiants as “a collection of short stories by 19th-century Lady Journalist Elizabeth Garver Jordan about the Experience of being a 19th-century Lady Journalist.” Honestly I should just link her review as it hits all the high points of the collection, which high points generally involve Lady Journalist Ruth Herrick forming intense connections with dreamy murderesses/nuns/dissolute Spanish dancers/etc. (There is also, for variety, one story where she meets a dreamy mountain youth.)I enjoyed this very much, and also very much enjoyed all the little details about life working on a major newspaper in the 1890s. Jordan worked in a newspaper herself and clearly watched her surroundings with a keen and affectionate eye.
What I’m Reading Now
I’ve taken the plunge on Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness! Will probably post about it at more length (perhaps in conjunction with Compton Mackenzie’s Extraordinary Women), but for now I wish to note that our heroine Stephen’s father (he and his wife actually named their daughter Stephen because they wanted a boy so much. This may be Hall’s theory about Why Lesbians), despite reading and rereading the sexologist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs ever since Stephen was about seven, does not manage to tell either his wife OR his daughter about his suspicions before he dies when Steven is eighteen. Buddy! Pal! Dude!
And I continue very slowly through Bruce Catton’s A Stillness at Appomattox, because Catton (justly!) wants to make sure that we feel the full horror of the wounded men screaming in the Wilderness as the fire creeps through the underbrush to burn them alive, and there is only so much of that I can take at one time. However I wish to report this incident as merely the latest illustration of my theory that the entire Union Army was born in a born: as the army made its way from the Wilderness to Spotsylvania Court House, a weary regiment of Pennsylvania cavalry ran into a rookie cavalry regiment with fresh mounts and decided that the middle of the night! during a running battle! was the right time to steal horses from, I cannot emphasize this enough, a regiment in their own army.
The two Union cavalry regiments brawled over the horses for an entire hour, during which time they completely snarled up the Union advance, which allowed the Confederate Army to get to Spotsylvania Court House first and dig in. Good going my dudes!
What I Plan to Read Next
It turns out that Elizabeth Garver Jordan also wrote (Tales of the Cloister), a book about NUNS. I am all about nuns! Clearly I must read it.
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Date: 2022-04-27 01:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-27 02:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-27 03:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-27 03:22 pm (UTC):D
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Date: 2022-04-27 03:44 pm (UTC)I should probably link it on Twitter, though. Although I suspect everyone who follows me on Twitter who has the faintest interest in Honeytrap has read it.
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Date: 2022-04-27 07:11 pm (UTC)(I was amused that Stephen has the same name-backstory as Shirley in Charlotte Brontë's novel, thus giving me more fuel for my femslash shipping in that book...!)
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Date: 2022-04-27 07:18 pm (UTC)Shirley/Caroline is the BEST Shirley ship and you should say it! And unlike, say, Lucy Snowe/Ginevra in Villette, I really think Shirley and Caroline could have been happy.
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Date: 2022-04-28 03:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-29 12:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-28 02:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-29 12:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-05-01 02:06 am (UTC)(I hit the Dreamy Mountain Youth story and I was like 'wow? a young man? this seems out of character for Ruth' and then it turned out this was all a proxy for her connection with the dissolute Spanish dancer and all came clear to me.)
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Date: 2022-05-01 11:40 am (UTC)Jordan threw in the young man to keep us guessing, probably. "Is Ruth going to have a fling with a dreamy mountain youth?" we asked, before realizing that this was all about the dreamy Spanish dancer in the end.