Wednesday Reading Meme
Jul. 6th, 2022 07:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Finished Reading
Emily Henry’s Book Lovers, which I really liked while I was reading it: for years I have yearned for a book about an uptight career woman who finds someone who loves her in all her uptight glory, and this book really delivers on that front. But after waiting a few days to write the review, I find I’ve forgotten the names of all the characters except the lead’s sister Libby? Puzzling.
I suppose that I often have this experience with, for instance, Mary Stewart books too, and there is something to be said for reading books that you enjoy even if they are not books that stick in your mind forever and ever.
I really liked this quote: “Maybe love shouldn’t be built on a foundation of compromises, but maybe it can’t exist without them either.”
I also finished Kim Todd’s Sensational: The Hidden History of America’s “Girl Stunt Reporters,” a fun and fascinating read that profiles a number of female reporters from the 1880s and 1890s: Nellie Bly, Elizabeth Jordan (of Tales of the City Room fame), Ida B. Wells. (I don’t think Wells is technically a stunt reporter but sometimes one must stretch one’s ostensible topic to include interesting people.) Todd suggests that Nellie Bly and her colleagues were the origin of the “girl reporter” character type - a direct line to characters like Lois Lane.
Naturally I just had to follow up by reading Nellie Bly’s Ten Days in a Mad-House, which is about Bly’s undercover investigation of the conditions at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island in New York City. An interesting (deeply depressing) source about conditions in American asylums in the 1880s, as well as general attitudes toward mental illness and the medical understanding (or lack thereof). Bly notes that once she got to the asylum she dropped her “mad” act as once, but none of the doctors or nurses ever even entertained the idea that she might be sane.
And I’ve continued my John McPhee journey with The Crofter and the Laird, his most famous and easily accessible book - so easily accessible, in fact, that I found it on my parents’ bookshelves! This is a fascinating look at life on the island of Colonsay in the Hebrides in the late 1960s, with lots of interesting tidbits about the history and folklore of the island.
What I’m Reading Now
Bruce Catton’s Terrible Swift Sword. In 1861, the U.S. Navy conquered two forts and a whole bunch of harbors in North Carolina - so much more than they expected to conquer that they were quite at a loss to follow it up by marching on Savannah, even though the Confederates had almost no forces to oppose such a march.
One thing I’ve learned from reading these military histories is that “unexpectedly huge victory” can be almost as disorienting as “catastrophic defeat.” Have a contingency plan just in case you succeed beyond your wildest dreams!
I’ve also begun T. H. White’s The Goshawk. The library only has this on audiobook so I approached it with trepidation, but actually the reader (Simon Vance) seems wonderfully in tune with the rhythms of White’s prose.
What I Plan to Read Next
In Sensational, Todd mentions that former girl stunt reporter Caroline Lockhart later (in 1912) wrote a book called Lady Doc, which involves lesbians and abortion and happens to be on Gutenberg so of course I HAVE to read it.
Emily Henry’s Book Lovers, which I really liked while I was reading it: for years I have yearned for a book about an uptight career woman who finds someone who loves her in all her uptight glory, and this book really delivers on that front. But after waiting a few days to write the review, I find I’ve forgotten the names of all the characters except the lead’s sister Libby? Puzzling.
I suppose that I often have this experience with, for instance, Mary Stewart books too, and there is something to be said for reading books that you enjoy even if they are not books that stick in your mind forever and ever.
I really liked this quote: “Maybe love shouldn’t be built on a foundation of compromises, but maybe it can’t exist without them either.”
I also finished Kim Todd’s Sensational: The Hidden History of America’s “Girl Stunt Reporters,” a fun and fascinating read that profiles a number of female reporters from the 1880s and 1890s: Nellie Bly, Elizabeth Jordan (of Tales of the City Room fame), Ida B. Wells. (I don’t think Wells is technically a stunt reporter but sometimes one must stretch one’s ostensible topic to include interesting people.) Todd suggests that Nellie Bly and her colleagues were the origin of the “girl reporter” character type - a direct line to characters like Lois Lane.
Naturally I just had to follow up by reading Nellie Bly’s Ten Days in a Mad-House, which is about Bly’s undercover investigation of the conditions at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island in New York City. An interesting (deeply depressing) source about conditions in American asylums in the 1880s, as well as general attitudes toward mental illness and the medical understanding (or lack thereof). Bly notes that once she got to the asylum she dropped her “mad” act as once, but none of the doctors or nurses ever even entertained the idea that she might be sane.
And I’ve continued my John McPhee journey with The Crofter and the Laird, his most famous and easily accessible book - so easily accessible, in fact, that I found it on my parents’ bookshelves! This is a fascinating look at life on the island of Colonsay in the Hebrides in the late 1960s, with lots of interesting tidbits about the history and folklore of the island.
What I’m Reading Now
Bruce Catton’s Terrible Swift Sword. In 1861, the U.S. Navy conquered two forts and a whole bunch of harbors in North Carolina - so much more than they expected to conquer that they were quite at a loss to follow it up by marching on Savannah, even though the Confederates had almost no forces to oppose such a march.
One thing I’ve learned from reading these military histories is that “unexpectedly huge victory” can be almost as disorienting as “catastrophic defeat.” Have a contingency plan just in case you succeed beyond your wildest dreams!
I’ve also begun T. H. White’s The Goshawk. The library only has this on audiobook so I approached it with trepidation, but actually the reader (Simon Vance) seems wonderfully in tune with the rhythms of White’s prose.
What I Plan to Read Next
In Sensational, Todd mentions that former girl stunt reporter Caroline Lockhart later (in 1912) wrote a book called Lady Doc, which involves lesbians and abortion and happens to be on Gutenberg so of course I HAVE to read it.
