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Wednesday Reading Meme
May. 1st, 2024 05:20 pmAn unusual bulletin of What I’ve Given Up Reading: I stalled out on Rumer Godden’s childhood memoir A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep a couple months ago, and have at last admitted to myself that I have no desire to finish it. I usually love childhood memoirs! But Godden seems to be going through her childhood and recollecting which incidents later gave rise to books, and it’s like she already got the pith out of them in making up the stories and there’s just not a lot left.
What I’ve Just Finished Reading
Carol Ryrie Brink’s Château Saint Barnabé, a short memoir about a month that Brink’s family spent at a dilapidated chateau-turned-boarding-house outside Marseilles in the 1920s. The book is structured around the tale of an American woman they met there, who had married a French sea captain forty years before and remained in Marseilles even after his death, though she longed to return to America – and yet when Brink offers to help her return to America, she refuses. “I am afraid…” she says; “afraid it might not be in America as I had dreamed it. I would rather keep the dream.”
Full of interesting details about daily life, and also interesting in that it confirms Family Sabbatical is indeed drawing on actual sabbaticals the Brink family spent in France. In fact, IIRC the novels includes a similar story about a woman who wants to return to America, I believe with a happier ending, although my memory is not too clear on this point.
Also Emma Southon’s A Rome of One’s Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire, which alas cannot quite live up to its fabulous title, which seems to promise that here we are going to examine the works of Roman women writers. We no longer have enough of their works to support a whole book, it seems. But the book is strongest when we do examine women’s own words: an early Christian martyr’s jail diary, a sequence of four poems carved on an Egyptian statue by a court poetess during Hadrian’s reign (one of them, endearingly, is about how beautiful Hadrian’s wife is, presumably to cheer her up while he’s weeping about the recently deceased Antinous), and—this is my favorite—some letters written by the wife of one military commander in Britain to the wife of the commander of a nearby fort, including an invitation to an upcoming birthday party. It’s so incredibly Mrs. Tim of the Regiment! The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Another Newbery Honor winner! Jeanette Eaton’s A Daughter of the Seine: The Life of Madame Roland. Embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know who Madame Roland was until I read this book.
And I finished Barbara Leonie Picard’s The Lady of the Linden Tree. All in all an undistinguished collection of original fairy tales, but all the same I’m glad I gave it a try.
What I’m Reading Now
Daphne Du Maurier’s The Birds, and Other Stories, which begins with “The Birds” (still one of the scariest stories in existence; imagine if the birds ever did decide they wanted to kill all humans), and continues with “Monte Verità,” which is best enjoyed unspoiled but concerns an unearthly mountain. You will be unsurprised to learn that Du Maurier is just as good at suspense in short stories as in novel form.
What I Plan to Read Next
My favorite Purdue library is closing for renovation over the summer! I have a bad feeling they are going to purge the children’s section, so I’ve checked out the books on my list: a couple of Sorche Nic Leodhas’s collections of Scottish ghost stories, two books by Susan Fletcher of Dragon’s Milk fame, Susan Cooper’s Victory, and a children’s history of Thermopylae by Mary Renault.
What I’ve Just Finished Reading
Carol Ryrie Brink’s Château Saint Barnabé, a short memoir about a month that Brink’s family spent at a dilapidated chateau-turned-boarding-house outside Marseilles in the 1920s. The book is structured around the tale of an American woman they met there, who had married a French sea captain forty years before and remained in Marseilles even after his death, though she longed to return to America – and yet when Brink offers to help her return to America, she refuses. “I am afraid…” she says; “afraid it might not be in America as I had dreamed it. I would rather keep the dream.”
Full of interesting details about daily life, and also interesting in that it confirms Family Sabbatical is indeed drawing on actual sabbaticals the Brink family spent in France. In fact, IIRC the novels includes a similar story about a woman who wants to return to America, I believe with a happier ending, although my memory is not too clear on this point.
Also Emma Southon’s A Rome of One’s Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire, which alas cannot quite live up to its fabulous title, which seems to promise that here we are going to examine the works of Roman women writers. We no longer have enough of their works to support a whole book, it seems. But the book is strongest when we do examine women’s own words: an early Christian martyr’s jail diary, a sequence of four poems carved on an Egyptian statue by a court poetess during Hadrian’s reign (one of them, endearingly, is about how beautiful Hadrian’s wife is, presumably to cheer her up while he’s weeping about the recently deceased Antinous), and—this is my favorite—some letters written by the wife of one military commander in Britain to the wife of the commander of a nearby fort, including an invitation to an upcoming birthday party. It’s so incredibly Mrs. Tim of the Regiment! The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Another Newbery Honor winner! Jeanette Eaton’s A Daughter of the Seine: The Life of Madame Roland. Embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know who Madame Roland was until I read this book.
And I finished Barbara Leonie Picard’s The Lady of the Linden Tree. All in all an undistinguished collection of original fairy tales, but all the same I’m glad I gave it a try.
What I’m Reading Now
Daphne Du Maurier’s The Birds, and Other Stories, which begins with “The Birds” (still one of the scariest stories in existence; imagine if the birds ever did decide they wanted to kill all humans), and continues with “Monte Verità,” which is best enjoyed unspoiled but concerns an unearthly mountain. You will be unsurprised to learn that Du Maurier is just as good at suspense in short stories as in novel form.
What I Plan to Read Next
My favorite Purdue library is closing for renovation over the summer! I have a bad feeling they are going to purge the children’s section, so I’ve checked out the books on my list: a couple of Sorche Nic Leodhas’s collections of Scottish ghost stories, two books by Susan Fletcher of Dragon’s Milk fame, Susan Cooper’s Victory, and a children’s history of Thermopylae by Mary Renault.
