Wednesday Reading Meme
May. 4th, 2022 07:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Tales of the Cloister, by Elizabeth G. Jordan. There are not quite as many dreamy women gazing soulfully at each other as in Tales of the City Room, although the first story starts us off with a bang with this deliciously tart description of a schoolgirl crush: convent student May Iverson “wrote notes to Sister George concerning the bitterness of existence, and put roses on her desk in the class-room, and laid bare her heart to her whenever that dignified woman could be induced to inspect the view, which was not often.”
I found the collection as a whole not quite as strong, but a couple of the individual stories stronger than anything in Tales of the City Room. “Under the Black Pall” in particular brought me close to tears (at work, too, for shame!) as a study in loneliness: as she takes her final vows, a nun looks back on her life and thinks that “In the world, even in the cloister, there seemed to be drawn around her a circle which no one passed.”
What I’m Reading Now
John McPhee’s Oranges, which is a delight! It’s a slim book (150 pages) packed with fascinating facts about the biology and history of oranges. Did you know that if you plant a seed from an orange, it might come up as a lemon, a lime, a grapefruit, a citron, or any one of various other citrus plants? It’s true! It’s weird! I love it!
What I Plan to Read Next
I may continue my John McPhee journey! He wrote a book called The Ransom of Russian Art, which is about an American collector who amassed a huge collection of unofficial Soviet art, and, well, you know me and the Soviets.
Tales of the Cloister, by Elizabeth G. Jordan. There are not quite as many dreamy women gazing soulfully at each other as in Tales of the City Room, although the first story starts us off with a bang with this deliciously tart description of a schoolgirl crush: convent student May Iverson “wrote notes to Sister George concerning the bitterness of existence, and put roses on her desk in the class-room, and laid bare her heart to her whenever that dignified woman could be induced to inspect the view, which was not often.”
I found the collection as a whole not quite as strong, but a couple of the individual stories stronger than anything in Tales of the City Room. “Under the Black Pall” in particular brought me close to tears (at work, too, for shame!) as a study in loneliness: as she takes her final vows, a nun looks back on her life and thinks that “In the world, even in the cloister, there seemed to be drawn around her a circle which no one passed.”
What I’m Reading Now
John McPhee’s Oranges, which is a delight! It’s a slim book (150 pages) packed with fascinating facts about the biology and history of oranges. Did you know that if you plant a seed from an orange, it might come up as a lemon, a lime, a grapefruit, a citron, or any one of various other citrus plants? It’s true! It’s weird! I love it!
What I Plan to Read Next
I may continue my John McPhee journey! He wrote a book called The Ransom of Russian Art, which is about an American collector who amassed a huge collection of unofficial Soviet art, and, well, you know me and the Soviets.
