osprey_archer | Entries tagged with classics

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

While I was in Canada, I pounced through a few of Lilian Jackson Braun’s The Cat Who… mysteries, which I have gazed at thoughtfully for years but put off reading because I had dire premonitions about cutesy talking cats.

There are no talking cats, cutesy or otherwise. There’s just Qwilleran, a reporter (who later in the series inherits a vast fortune and becomes a man of leisure who lives in a converted barn in an apple orchard) who solves mysteries with the help of his Siamese cat, Koko. Or at least he thinks Koko is helping. He also thinks that his mustache bristles when something suspicious happens, so he might just be an eccentric.

I read two of Braun’s novels and enjoyed them both, but to my surprise, my favorite was her book of short stories, The Cat Who Had 14 Tales. All the stories are cat-themed, but many of them aren’t mysteries: there’s a ghost story, an SF story about cat-like aliens, three stories told in the form of interviews at an old folks’ home, and an epistolary story. It really showcases Braun’s ability to create different voices and capture different time periods and it’s a lot of fun.

I also read a couple of Billabongs, a couple of Netgalley books (those will get their own posts), and Mary Stewart’s Thornyhold, which I enjoyed so much that I instantly lent it to my mother. In the years after World War II, our heroine Gilly (pronounced Jilly) inherits a beautiful house and garden from her godmother. “I looked out of the taxi window as the houses dwindled back and the road began to wind between high, banked hedges full of ivy and holly glistening with recent rain, and the red berries of honeysuckle twining through pillowfight drifts of traveller’s joy.” (37)

There’s a bit of supernatural coloring here, but mostly the story is about Gilly settling in the house and the neighborhood and making it her own and - it’s just a very calming read.

What I’m Reading Now

I’m taking another crack at Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. I’m about a three-quarters of the way through it and there is something compulsively readable about Raskolnikov’s circular self-torturing “Have they realized yet that I murdered the old lady???” thoughts, but at the same time, man this could have used an editor.

Also reading Brian Switek’s My Beloved Brontosaurus, which is a little bit about the newest finds in dinosaur science but also about our emotional attachment to dinosaurs: why so many children go through a dinosaur phase, why we’re expected to grow out of our dinosaur phases, and why we cling to the name Brontosaurus even though by the rules of scientific nomenclature it ought to be Apatosaurus.

I would have preferred a bit more about dinosaurs and a bit less about how we feel about dinosaurs: the preference for Brontosaurus, for instance, strikes me as pretty self-explanatory. It’s more fun to say and it just sounds bigger. Of course people prefer it.

What I Plan to Read Next

I got a bunch of Mary Stewarts for my birthday, which I ought to space out a bit, because they are apt to run together if you read too many at once. But one more should be okay… I’m awfully tempted by her first book, Madam, Will You Talk?

I finished the Iliad! Actually I finished it a bit ago, but I’ve spent some time mulling over the best way to explain the weird experience that is listening to this ancient epic, and finally hit on this one: it’s like watching someone playing a video game. Occasionally there’s a cut scene where some plot happens, but mostly it’s just fight scene after fight scene and “then his eyeballs popped out of his head because Diomedes hit him with a rock so hard.”

They hit each other with rocks a lot. Also, no one’s armor works unless a god is literally standing there going “Function, armor!”

You know which Iliad character has been totally shafted by history? Diomedes. There’s a cleaner named after Ajax, a tendon named after Achilles, and a word based on Odysseus’s name (admittedly, for the Odyssey and not the Iliad, but still), but Diomedes makes like 50% of the kills in this book (not a scientific estimate) and have I ever heard of him before? NO. The unfairness. He actually wounded the goddess Aphrodite! And lived to tell the tale!

There does not appear to be a follow-up story where Aphrodite gets her revenge by making Diomedes fall in love with someone totally unsuitable, like a ninety-year-old swineherd or something. How can you let this insult stand, Aphrodite? Athena turned a lady into a spider for way less.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Frances Little’s Jack and I in Lotus Land, in which the intrepid heroine of The Lady of the Decoration and her husband Jack return to Japan to recuperate after the stresses of the Great War. Jack manages to relax for approximately two days before the Red Cross summons him to Vladivostok to care for Russian war orphans, leaving the Lady on her own to gallivant through Japan. I often get a bit bored with landscape descriptions but Little’s are so clear and lovely (and, it must be said, concise) that I enjoy them. You could imagine this scenery in a Studio Ghibli film.

Little’s book also shares with many Ghibli films a fascination with work, particularly woman’s work. The Lady meets a female motor bus conductor, tours a paper run by women (“In the book binding business, the printing business, and in typesetting, Japanese women hold their own with the men of their kind,” (131) she comments), and admires the hard work and good spirits of country women picking tea or looking after the silkworms in a factory.

I also read another Newbery Honor book, Amy Timberlake’s One Came Home, which I didn’t particularly like because it follows a plot I rarely enjoy, wherein the hero or heroine’s (heroine, in this case) loved one (sister) supposedly dies, only the heroine is convinced that she is ACTUALLY ALIVE and sets out on a quest to prove it

This is a quest with two possible endings and IMO neither are very satisfying. It’s a bummer if the loved one turns out to be dead and the whole point was to teach a lesson about The Finality of Death, but it’s also sort of irritating if the protagonist is 100% right and the loved one is in fact alive. I mean come on.

However, One Came Home does at least avoid the most annoying ending, where the loved one purposefully faked their own death and is therefore basically a psychopath (somehow, no one ever takes this in a “so in a way they ARE dead! The decent human being the protagonist always loved never really existed!” direction), and there is a lot of stuff about passenger pigeons, so there are enjoyable elements.

What I’m Reading Now

I’m still thrashing through the Iliad. I am so bored of descriptions of soldiers dying gory deaths. As far as I can tell their armor only actually works if a god purposefully strengthens it right at the moment of impact.

I’m also reading Susan Coolidge’s Eyebright, which starts out as a tale of young Isabella Bright (I. Bright… Eyebright) who lives in a small town in New York and entertains her friends with imaginative adventure stories. At one point her school takes a field trip to the local Shaker settlement, a turn of events that delighted me beyond words.

And then I guess Susan Coolidge got bored because she killed off the heroine’s invalid mother, bankrupted her father (the bankruptcy is unrelated to the mother’s death; it just kind of all happens at once), and now Eyebright and her father have moved to his one remaining possession, a tiny farm on a small island off the coast of Maine.

I always find nineteenth-century plotting sort of fascinating because authors will just do stuff like this. You start off reading one book and it takes a completely weird turn and then suddenly the author is resolving a difficult plot problem with a volcano eruption, as Frances Little Does in Jack and I in Lotus Land. (Don’t worry. It’s a small eruption - just large enough to show the comparative mettle of the heroine’s protegee’s two suitors.)

What I Plan to Read Next

Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn! I am excited because (1) Daphne du Maurier!!!, and (2) there is a miniseries based on this book which is directed by a woman (and therefore fits my project) AND stars Jessica Brown Findlay, who played Lady Sybil on Downton Abbey. I quit the show mid-episode when it became clear that Sybil was about to die. Nothing I have heard about it since has made me regret this decision.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished The Time Traveler’s Guide to Restoration Britain, which I found a bit of a slog to get through. Is it because I’m just not that interested in the Restoration period, or is it really not quite as interesting as The Time Traveler’s Guide to Medieval England?

And I finished Gabor Mate’s In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, which I wanted to write about at more length - I selected a bunch of quotes and everything! - but I’ve run out of time, so for now I’m just going to share this one: “A therapist once said to me, ‘When it comes to a choice between feeling guilt or resentment, choose the guilt every time.’” (401)

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun A. A. Milne’s Once on a Time, a pleasingly arch fairy tale parody, which is also a parody of history books (Milne has invented a historian of this imaginary country, with whom he often politely disagrees). It’s fun but it’s also very clear why Milne achieved immortality for the Winnie the Pooh books instead.

I’ve also begun listening to the Iliad! Which has an entire benighted chapter just listing all the captains who fought at Troy and their lineages and hometowns, good lord, and then all the captains on the Trojan side, just for parity, although thank God there are not nearly as many of them.

Now Paris and Menelaus have attempted to end the war through single combat, only for Aphrodite to spirit Paris away to Helen’s bedchamber at the crucial moment. Oh, Aphrodite. That seems short-sighted - which I suppose love often is.

And I am continuing onward with Sara Jeannette Duncan’s A Social Departure! This week, Duncan has shared a number of dry observations about travel cliches, including this gem: “somebody had told us that the proper and usual thing for strangers with a couple of hours in Hong Kong to do was to go up the Peak. Although Orthodocia reminded me that we had not come to China in search of hackneyed commonplaces, we also went up the Peak. It was one of the things that we did which convinced us that the travelling public quite understands what it is about, and that the hackneyed commonplace exists only in the minds of people who stay at home.” (186)

What I Plan to Read Next

I have hopes that the library will soon hook me up with the next Edward Eager book, The Well-Wishers.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Winston Churchill’s Savrola, which only gets more delightfully iddy as it goes on. It includes this delightful exchange between the despotic President of Laurania and Savrola, who has just been caught kissing the President’s wife (who is totes in love with Savrola now, they’ve spoken like three times but that’s enough):

“Down on your knees and beg for mercy, you hound; down, or I will blow your face in!”

“I have always tried to despise death, and have always succeeded in despising you. I shall bow to neither.”

Savrola succeeds in defeating the despotic president, only for the tide of politics to turn against him, forcing him to flee the city with his love. They stop at the top of a hill to gaze back at the burning city. “‘And that,’ said Savrola after prolonged contemplation, ‘is my life’s work.’”

And then he nobly rides on, the human embodiment of the paragon described in Rudyard Kipling’s “If,” who can “meet with Triumph and Disaster/And treat those two imposters just the same.”

BUT WORRY NOT. Later on the people realize their folly and summon Savrola back, so after nobly bearing tragic defeat, he enjoys triumph after all.

I also read Elizabeth Enright’s Gone-Away Lake, which was delightful! On an early summer exploring expedition, cousins Portia and Julian discover a pair of quirky old people living in a colony of abandoned summer homes by the edge of a swamp (which used to be a lake), one of which they offer to our heroes Portia and Julian to make over into a clubhouse (!!!!!), AND there are illustrations by the husband-and-wife team who illustrated The Borrowers. Could you ask for more from a single book? It’s a perfect summer idyll of a novel.

What I’m Reading Now

I meant to save up my Sara Jeannette Duncans, but in the end I couldn’t resist, and I’ve begun reading A Social Departure: How Orthodocia and I Went Round the World by Ourselves, which is, well, what it says on the tin. In the late 1880s Duncan and her fellow journalist Lily Lewis (a.k.a. Orthodocia) traveled round the world together, starting in Montreal and working their way westward. They passed through Vancouver a mere two years after it was founded and have now landed in Japan, where they have had many adventures, not least of which involves eating something Duncan calls a fish roll which sounds an awful lot like sushi.

They also rent a tiny house for the duration of their stay, which prompts the characteristically droll reflection, “We might even make it valuable to other people by starting a domestic reform movement, when we went home, based on the Japanese idea. Life amounts to very little in this age if one cannot institute a reform of some sort, and we were glad of the opportunity to identify ourselves with the spirit of the times. We were thankful, too, that we had thought of a reform before they were all used up by more enterprising persons, which seems to be a contingency not very remote.” (76)

What I Plan to Read Next

The Iliad, as read by Dan Stevens. I meant to be a bit more thoughtful in my selection of which translation, but then I saw the audiobook with Dan Stevens as the reader and I threw caution to the winds, because it will be like I am listening to the bards of old and anyway the most important thing in an audiobook is a reader you like.

He also read The Odyssey and The Aeneid. I could get really cultured this summer.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished William Heyliger’s Captain of the Nine, in which that PERFIDIOUS TRAITOR Mellen becomes so filled with loathing of the team captain, Bartley, that Mellen tries to throw the final game of the season by sending a fake telegram telling one of the players that his father’s sick and he has to go home. THAT DIRTY RAT. I thought nothing could be lower than Kennedy’s blackmail trick in Bartley, Freshman Pitcher BUT I WAS WRONG.

Fortunately Mellen’s trick is caught in time, the other player is retrieved, and Mellen is kicked off the team - although they decide to allow him to graduate so as not to hurt his mother. ONLY HIS MOTHER FINDS OUT ABOUT HIS DISGRACEFUL BEHAVIOR and drags Mellen away, presumably by his ear, and she is going to be disappointed with him for the rest of his misbegotten life and I would be delighted by this poetic justice except that his poor mother was so looking forward to watching him graduate and instead all she gets to witness is his bitter shame.

I also finished listening to Roald Dahl’s memoir Going Solo, about his time working for Shell in east Africa just before World War II and his time in the RAF in North Africa and Greece during the war, which is fascinating and sometimes quite funny even as it is horrifying (as you would expect from Dahl). Possibly something that would interest my fellow Code Name Verity fans, although of course it is a very different thing.

What I’m Reading Now

I’m listening to Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. I’m not in love with the audiobook narrator, but the book has drawn me in so effectively that it doesn’t really matter. Leopold has been sawing down a lightning-blighted oak and drifting back in time tree ring by tree ring, noting ecological milestones as he goes. This is the year Wisconsin decided to drain all its wetlands, or the last major passenger pigeon hunt in the area, or so forth.

Possibly this sounds grim (Leopold is writing against the majority opinion of his society vis-a-vis conservation and he knows it), but even with a subpar audiobook reader it’s actually quite soothing to listen to. Yes, Leopold! You follow those skunk tracks through the melting snow and muse upon the life cycle of the meadow mouse!

This is much more enlivening than Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. The book is basically a series of philosophical memoranda that Marcus wrote to himself, and therefore pretty repetitive. There are countless meditations that follow the same basic outline as this one: “On death: If the universe is composed only of diverse atoms, death is dispersion; if the universe is really one unified whole, death is extinction or transfiguration.”

The fact that Marcus repeats it so many times make me doubt its efficacy at making him dread death less.

Having said this, this isn’t really a book that you’re meant to read right through, and it probably works better if you just open to a random page and dip into it. Although it’s hard to imagine a day where the wisdom you really need is “Just as circus games and other popular entertainments offer the same tedious scenes over and over, so it is with life - an appalling sameness, a tiresome round of cause and effect. When will it ever end?” Thanks, I guess!

I’m also - good God am I reading a lot this week - reading Caroline Dale Snedeker’s Seth Way: A Romance of the New Harmony Community, which I took some time to get into, but now the book has introduced a bright-eyed young woman from Europe with Ideals about women’s rights and the abolition of slavery and the glory of democratic government, and everyone who meets her either loves her or despises her and the book has become ten times more interesting to me.

I think historical fiction often fails in depicting forward thinking outspoken people by failing to grapple with how disruptive that can be - what’s forward-thinking in the past is often just common sense in the present and therefore no longer feels disruptive - but Seth Way is really going for it and it gives me a good feeling about how the book may eventually deal with the collapse of New Harmony.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m finally going to read Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler! This has been on my to-read list since I was in college and finally I’m going to read it.

I’ve also decided that now is the time to read the rest of Edward Eager’s books, so I’m starting in on The Time Garden as soon as the library brings it to me.

What I've Just Finished Reading

I have completed the first challenge in my 2018 Reading Challenge with The Black Arrow! I'm posting this so late because I decided I wanted to steamroll through the last few chapters to get it done for this week's Wednesday Reading. Stevenson is a real hit-or-miss author for me and this one was mostly a miss, although I did enjoy John Matcham, the girl in boy's clothes (apparently this plotline never gets old for me), and her saucy best friend Alicia.

What I'm Reading Now

A Skinful of Shadows got set aside in favor of The Black Arrow, so I remain exactly where I was last week, lackaday.

What I Plan to Read Next

I went to a library for a job interview today (which went well! I think! It will be at least two weeks before I know) and it seemed like it would be good luck to check out a book while I was there... So I got Nancy Atherton's Aunt Dimity and the Buried Treasure, on the grounds that I have long meant vaguely to check out these books, which are about... um, I think Aunt Dimity is a ghost, and she helps her niece solve mysteries?

What I Just Finished Reading

Nothing! *dramatic sigh* Not an auspicious start to the new year.

In my defense I have been doing a lot of writing, and there are only so many hours in a day.

What I’m Reading Now

My mother got me some new Miss Read books for Christmas! So I am reading Over the Hedge, which kicks off with a story about a woman who discovered a recipe for a potion that allowed her to float.

None of the other Miss Read books had any speculative element whatsoever, so I am bemused by this turn of events, but accepting. And also this is a story that the other characters are telling to our narrator about a woman who died over fifty years ago, so it may turn out to have gotten quite distorted in the telling, as stories are apt to do over the decades.

I’ve also been reading Fanny Kemble’s memoir Records of a Girlhood on my Kindle. Fanny Kemble was a nineteenth-century English actress, child of a dynasty of actors (indeed, she was the niece of another English actress named Fanny Kemble), and her memoir is both good research material and entertaining in its own right.

I’ve highlighted a number of passages I liked, including this one: “The passion for universal history (i.e. any and every body’s story) nowadays seems to render any thing in the shape of personal recollections good enough to be printed and read”; which seems to pair up nicely with the later observation that “there is no denying the life is essentially interesting - every life, any life, all lives, if their detailed history could be given with truth and simplicity.”

At the start of my history graduate program we read quite a bit about the nature of history - whether history is essentially the study of the history of politics and wars and economics, or if it is the history of everything, which is the view in vogue right now, at least in academia, where military and political history are quite out of fashion. It’s therefore amusing to me to see someone declaring much the same thing in a book published in the 1870s.

But on the other hand, here’s a quote from one of Kemble’s letters: “I mean to make studying German and drawing (and endeavoring the abate my self-esteem) my principal occupations this winter.” Can you imagine anyone today declaring her intention to apply herself to abating her self-esteem? It’s the twenty-first century! There’s no such thing as too much self-esteem! Sometimes things truly change.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve got a hold on Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Black Arrow! I’m taking my reading challenge by the horns this year: no more letting the end of the month sneak up on me with the challenge still incomplete! Um, assuming the library gets my hold to me in a reasonable time frame, which I suppose one ought not to assume…

But it was a copy with illustrations by N. C. Wyeth, you guys (he was one of Howard Pyle's students and illustrates in a similar style), I could not pass that up!

It's been a dispiriting week so I'm behind in The Three Musketeers, but I can at least report that the characters have been suffering a week even more dispiriting than mine. D'Artagnan is dispirited because Milady is trying to kill him! Milady is dispirited because her stupid assassins just keep failing! The musketeers themselves are downcast because, as a result of their efforts to help d'Artagnan, they too are now in Milady's crosshairs.

We have not seen Anne d'Autriche or Constance Bonacieux for quite a few chapters, but Queen Anne is still married to Louis XIII and Constance is hidden away in a convent to save her from Milady's vengeance so I think we can take it as read that they are suffering too. They are my favorites and I hope we will get more chapters about them (and by that I mean that I hope we get another scene where Constance flings herself to her knees to swear allegiance to Queen Anne, I HAVE SIMPLE NEEDS), but sadly I think it will be some time before they show up again. WOE.

Also, I've got to say. For the most part I am really into Athos's "strong and silent noble lord who is fleeing from his opulent yet dark past, yet cannot fully conceal his innate superiority, and also has suffered so much that he's just totally zen about death because after everything else that happens to him that's small potatoes" -

But goddamn is he an asshole to his lackey. Let the poor man speak, Athos! And for God's sake don't drag him into a picnic in an abandoned bastion in the middle of a battlefield! (The musketeers are picnicking in this unlikely place so they can discuss their future plans without eavesdroppers.) I guess probably it's beneath a musketeer's dignity to carry his own picnic basket - but dude, try it just this once.

In every Dumas, it seems, a few dull chapters must fall. We had the Epic High Drama of d'Artagnan's race to England to save the Queen's honor, and then d'Artagnan's less epic but still delightfully picaresque journey to retrieve his friends, who had been waylaid by the cardinal's men during said race to England.

I particularly enjoyed Aramis's about-face: he's on the very cusp of becoming a clergyman, only to become again an enthusiastic musketeer when d'Artagnan shows Aramis a note form his mistress. Clearly a man of the "Lord, make me chaste; but not yet," persuasion.

So after all that excitement it was perhaps inevitable that there would be a bit of a letdown. The last few chapters have been mostly about d'Artagnan's love/hate infatuation with Milady (moderately amusing! But also HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN CONSTANCE, D'ARTAGNAN?) and his friends' attempts to get their hands on enough money to outfit themselves for the latest war, which honestly seems like a drag. They had wonderful horses from England, Dumas! If you could have just left them those horses, we wouldn't have to worry about all this rigmarole, and could instead be galloping ahead in the plot.

I am also pining for more of Anne of Autriche. Possibly her part of the book is done and over with, though.

The queen let out a piercing cry on seeing herself caught, for in her agitation she did not at first recognize the young woman who had been given her by La Porte.

"Oh, don't be afraid of anything, Madame!" said the young woman, pressing her hands together and weeping at the queen's distress herself. "I am Your Majesty's, body and soul, and far as I am from her, inferior as my position is, I believe I have found a way to save Your Majesty from grief."

"You? Oh, heavens! You?" cried the queen. "But come, look me in the face. I'm betrayed on all sides; can I trust you?"

"Oh, Madame!" cried the young woman, falling to her knees, "upon my soul, I am ready to die for Your Majesty!"

THANK YOU, DUMAS. THANK YOU FOR GIVING ME EVERYTHING I HAVE EVER WANTED. The loyalty! In the midst of betrayal! Falling to one's knees and pledging to die for your liege lord! And with girls, which is all that I want in life and something that I hardly ever get.

I may end up taking this back once we meet the Countess de Winter (...I can't quite see yet how to work a Rebecca crossover, but REST ASSURED it is on my mind), but so far in both The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo I have really appreciated how much Dumas simply treats women as people. They get to drama llama just as much as his men, and he hasn't done any finger-wagging at either Anne of Austria or Constance Bonacieux (the young woman in the above quotation) who have both gotten entangled in extramarital affairs - but they're both married to total jerks anyway so Dumas is like, eh, so it goes.

( Spoilers through Chapter 23 )

Let The Three Musketeers commence! I am actually super enjoying it, partly because my expectations were set helpfully low by all the people who warned me it was awful and/or not as good as The Count of Monte Cristo, and also partly because it is just super well geared to my tastes. THE LOYALTY KINK OH MY GOD.

For instance, for instance. Athos' first appearance is the time that he walks into M. de Treville's office bleeding from a shoulder wound, pale from blood loss, and then keels over in a dead faint - but M. de Treville called him! And when a musketeer is called, he obeys!

And of course the musketeers are all ludicrously loyal to each other, which is also glorious, although it hasn't hit me where I live in quite the same way as Athos' fainting to prove his loyalty. Although I did love the way D'Artagnan befriends the three musketeers: he challenges each one to a duel, one after the other (without realizing they are bffs, of course) - only for the first duel to be interrupted by the Cardinal's spoilsport guards, on account of dueling is technically forbidden. D'Artagnan fights at the musketeers' side, and zing! They're all besties.

Still, I only just finished chapter 10, so there is time. One of them will surely get stabbed at least a little bit in defense of the others.

( Some spoilery musings )

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Pierrepont Noyes’ My Father’s House: An Oneida Childhood, which I liked very much; although of course I would, being fond of a) childhood memoirs (I tend to agree with C. S. Lewis that “I never read an autobiography in which the parts devoted to the earlier years were not far the most interesting”), b) memoirs about cults (really anything about cults), and c) the nineteenth century.

But even if you are interested in only one of those things, this is an engaging book; much recommended. The one thing it will not give you is a clear description of the Oneida Community’s collapse: Noyes was ten at the time and found the whole thing ominous but fuzzy.

I also finished rereading A Wrinkle in Time. I’m glad I reread it because I no longer feel that vague gnawing sense that I just didn’t get it - but at the same time, it’s a bit sad to reread it and realize that I’m just never going to love that book the way that some people do.

What I’m Reading Now

Kidnapped! I only intended to begin it, but somehow I ended up halfway through the book already. It’s such a cracking good adventure yarn, it’s very hard to put down!

I have begun Jane Langton’s The Astonishing Stereoscope! It’s early days yet, but I have high hopes that it will live up to the other books in the series - or at least the early books in the series; I hold a real grudge against Time Bike for being so dreadful that it stopped my exploration of the Hall Family Chronicles, even though I adored both The Diamond in the Window and The Fledgling. But fortunately the good books in the series are the kind that are just as good if you read them first as an adult.

What I Plan to Read Next

The Railway Children, which I also intended to read next last week, but I bought Noyes’ memoir at the museum and it simply had to take precedence, so… But this week I am quite determined! Railway Children or bust! Unless I find something simply irresistible in Amherst.

I finished The Count of Monte Cristo! Confetti falls from the sky, trumpets blast, we all slam down our glasses like Thor and shout, "Another!"

Well, maybe not another just yet. But now that I've discovered Dumas, I would like to read The Three Musketeers in the not-too-distant future.

( Spoilers for all of Monte Cristo )

Crossposts: http://osprey-archer.livejournal.com/565009.html

I'm racing toward the end of The Count of Monte Cristo! Only about a dozen chapters left now - and so many threads to wrap up!!!

( How will the Count manage it all??? )

THE MOMENT WE HAVE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR HAS ARRIVED!!!

( SPOILERS OBVIOUSLY )

We are racing swiftly toward the end! It's been so hard to limit myself to one chapter a day this week, what with the whole story coming together the way it is.

OH MY GOD THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO IS GOING TO KILL ME WITH SUSPENSE AND FEELS AND ALL I WANT IS MORE. All of the Count's plans are coming together ALL AT ONCE and it's so exciting and also MERCEDES.

( MERCEDES OH MY GOD )

We're moving right along in The Count of Monte Cristo! I'm about two thirds of the way through the book, and the plot-nooses are tightening around the necks of Dantes' enemies...

( Spoilers! )

I have been zooming through The Count of Monte Cristo this week! The wheels in the Count's plans are beginning ever so slowly to turn and it's gotten ever so much more exciting; it began to drag a bit there during the interminable section in Rome.

A few more thoughts! Helpfully arranged in a list, because the plot has grown so diffuse that I'm not sure how else to organize them.

( Spoilers, of course )

The Count has made it to Paris! The story is still staying firmly out of his POV, though, which disappoints me. I realize this makes it easier to hide the specifics of his plans for VENGEANCE, but I want to get back in his twisted angsty head!

Also, let's be real, I'm kind of sorry that the dungeon section wasn't longer. I am all about the dungeons.

BUT THERE ARE COMPENSATIONS. In these last few chapters, Dantes has at last

( spoilers! )

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A Certain Slant of Light

otherwise known as Jin's journal

Entries tagged with classics

Wednesday Reading Meme

The Iliad

Wednesday Reading Meme

Wednesday Reading Meme

Wednesday Reading Meme

Wednesday Reading Meme

Wednesday Reading Meme

Wednesday Reading Meme

Three Musketeers: Chapter 47

Three Musketeers: Chapter 36

Three Musketeers Thursday: Chapter 23

Three Musketeers Thursday: Chapter 10

Wednesday Reading Meme

Count of Monte Cristo: The End

Count of Monte Cristo: Chapter 106

Count of Monte Cristo: Chapter 97

Count of Monte Cristo: Chapter 91

Count of Monte Cristo: Chapter 82

Count of Monte Cristo: Chapter 63

Count of Monte Cristo: Chapter 43

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