Wednesday Reading Meme
Oct. 19th, 2022 08:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
This week’s Wednesday Reading Meme brought to you bylittlerhymes! We have finished Mary Stewart’s The Hollow Hills! I enjoyed it more than The Crystal Cave: Merlin spends way less time getting kicked in the face by life, and everything bucks up once young Arthur appears on the scene. Love his friend Bedwyr with his little crush on Arthur! (You really don’t see much of Bedwyr in most recent adaptations. Is it because the name Bedwyr sounds goofy to modern ears?)
littlerhymes also sent me Christine Pullein-Thompson’s Stolen Ponies, a pony book from the 1970s in which the five children set out to find out who is stealing the ponies on the moors… only for one of the children to get dreadfully lost, which takes up most of the rest of the book, until he stumbles on the pony thief by accident! The plotting is odd and meandering and the characterization not very sharp - especially for the ponies, who are interchangeable as bicycles.
What I’m Reading Now
littlerhymes and I have begun The Last Enchantments! We have concluded that the entire fall of Camelot could have been avoided if Merlin had kidnapped Mordred and had him raised by some kindly country squire, rather like Arthur himself. Alas there is no way to communicate this conclusion to Merlin himself, so unfortunately he’s still on a collision course to maybe attempting to drown a baby.
In The Wounded Name, Aymar has been reunited with his cousin/ladylove, whom he insists on not explaining the true reason for his disgrace, as it occurred in part because he thought she was in danger of being executed as a spy! I’m sure this will not backfire on him in any way.
Things have been pretty quiet on the Dracula front - the calm before the storm, of course - which has given me time to reflect that when I first read this in high school I thought it was a typical Victorian novel. Reading it now, with greater understanding of Victorian literature, I can see that while none of the details specifically are atypical, the sheer density of Stalwart Manhood is a lot even by Victorian standards.
What I Plan to Read Next
I’ve been writing up a storm this month, which doesn’t leave much time for reading, so I’ve jettisoned my goal of clearing off my TBR shelf before I head to Massachusetts at the beginning of November. My new goal is to polish off the books I’ve got out from the library: Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road, Elizabeth Seeger’s The Pageant of Chinese History (last of the Newbery Honors for a while!), and Mary Renault’s North Face.
This week’s Wednesday Reading Meme brought to you by
littlerhymes! We have finished Mary Stewart’s The Hollow Hills! I enjoyed it more than The Crystal Cave: Merlin spends way less time getting kicked in the face by life, and everything bucks up once young Arthur appears on the scene. Love his friend Bedwyr with his little crush on Arthur! (You really don’t see much of Bedwyr in most recent adaptations. Is it because the name Bedwyr sounds goofy to modern ears?)littlerhymes also sent me Christine Pullein-Thompson’s Stolen Ponies, a pony book from the 1970s in which the five children set out to find out who is stealing the ponies on the moors… only for one of the children to get dreadfully lost, which takes up most of the rest of the book, until he stumbles on the pony thief by accident! The plotting is odd and meandering and the characterization not very sharp - especially for the ponies, who are interchangeable as bicycles. What I’m Reading Now
littlerhymes and I have begun The Last Enchantments! We have concluded that the entire fall of Camelot could have been avoided if Merlin had kidnapped Mordred and had him raised by some kindly country squire, rather like Arthur himself. Alas there is no way to communicate this conclusion to Merlin himself, so unfortunately he’s still on a collision course to maybe attempting to drown a baby.In The Wounded Name, Aymar has been reunited with his cousin/ladylove, whom he insists on not explaining the true reason for his disgrace, as it occurred in part because he thought she was in danger of being executed as a spy! I’m sure this will not backfire on him in any way.
Things have been pretty quiet on the Dracula front - the calm before the storm, of course - which has given me time to reflect that when I first read this in high school I thought it was a typical Victorian novel. Reading it now, with greater understanding of Victorian literature, I can see that while none of the details specifically are atypical, the sheer density of Stalwart Manhood is a lot even by Victorian standards.
What I Plan to Read Next
I’ve been writing up a storm this month, which doesn’t leave much time for reading, so I’ve jettisoned my goal of clearing off my TBR shelf before I head to Massachusetts at the beginning of November. My new goal is to polish off the books I’ve got out from the library: Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road, Elizabeth Seeger’s The Pageant of Chinese History (last of the Newbery Honors for a while!), and Mary Renault’s North Face.
no subject
Date: 2022-10-19 07:05 pm (UTC)No, no, definitely not! *g*
the sheer density of Stalwart Manhood is a lot even by Victorian standards
Can you elaborate? *curious* I haven't read Dracula...
no subject
Date: 2022-10-20 03:52 pm (UTC)Re: Dracula, there are a lot of passages about Stalwart Men summoning their Manliness to protect Pure Delicate Women, and it's all very much the sort of thing you might read in a Victorian novel (not all Victorian novels are like this, but I'm never surprised when they are like this) but it usually doesn't happen quite so many times as it does in Dracula.
no subject
Date: 2022-10-20 05:12 pm (UTC)There should be a scale for density of Stalwart Manhood, and then we could rate books using it. It would need a guy who was stalwart but only mildly so, so that you could have several of him if a book was particularly dense.
no subject
Date: 2022-10-20 05:35 pm (UTC)Possibly also a data point that Telemakos of the salt mines has an adoring family which is struggling mightily to get him out, whereas if Merlin had gotten sold into the salt mines early on in the Crystal Cave no one would have lifted a finger to free him. Telemakos ventures out into danger but at home he's safe, whereas young Merlin is just... in danger, all the time. There's no release of tension.
Arthur is conceived at the end of The Crystal Cave and shows up as a character halfway through The Hollow Hills. (We meet him earlier, but he's a baby and basically a prop at that point.)
no subject
Date: 2022-10-20 05:40 pm (UTC)Also, I am realizing I must have liked The Hollow Hills because it was definitely young Arthur as a cool character that I enjoyed.
no subject
Date: 2022-10-20 07:25 pm (UTC)I love The Crystal Cave best because it adheres the least closely to the beats of the Matter of Britain, but the relationship of Merlin and Arthur in The Hollow Hills has grown in resonance over the years for me.
(For what it's worth, I don't think of the first one as a book of unremitting danger to Merlin, even though it's built out from the legendary crux of Vortigern wanting the blood of a child born of no mortal father to mortar the stones of his tower that will not stand; it has always been much more about engineering and the numinous and knowing yourself to be different, which is not always tragedy. I love what Stewart does with Merlin's parentage and with the standing stones. A key scene was one of my early introductions to Mithraism.)
no subject
Date: 2022-10-20 07:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-20 07:39 pm (UTC)I have still never come around to loving The Last Enchantment, but The Crystal Cave holds up as of this summer and I liked The Hollow Hills better this time around. (Besides the relationship of Merlin and Arthur, the sword of Macsen Wledig and the very clever reworking of the fisher king are the points in its favor for me.)
no subject
Date: 2022-10-20 06:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-20 08:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-20 07:16 pm (UTC)There's one in The Kid Who Would Be King (2019), which I keep meaning to write about, and everyone calls him "Bedders" because it is clear that his parents embarrassed him for life with his wallet name.
no subject
Date: 2022-10-20 08:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-23 08:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-22 03:36 am (UTC)I can't believe no one else has ever solved the fall of Camelot as neatly as we have, HONESTLY people it's EASY!!! I will write to Merlin and tell him what to do.
no subject
Date: 2022-10-22 01:22 pm (UTC)Solving the falling of Camelot WOULD be easy if only Morgause weren't so devilishly clever. Sneaking the child away just ahead of the massacre... casting blame for the massacre onto Arthur... Merlin may have met his match!