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Wednesday Reading Meme
Aug. 19th, 2020 08:47 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
“We’re not programmed to register more than a hundred corpses. In heaps they simply become a landscape feature.”
I finished Margaret Atwood’s The Tent, a book of short stories - flash fiction, really, in many cases, some of them are barely more than a page. I must admit that I often wanted them to be longer, for there to be more to sink my teeth into - but they do share with Atwood’s novels that razor-edged humor, the wry dark way of looking at the world.
I was hoping that Deborah Yaffe’s Among the Janeites: A Journey through the World of Jane Austen Fandom would be something along the lines of a detailed fandom wank guide: allll about the Fanny Price wars! Not to mention a more critical attitude toward Arnie Perlstein, whom she notes is such an obnoxious commentator that message board moderators have been forced to warn each other about him, but this is mentioned almost as an aside. Instead it’s more of a general tour of the many different types of Austen fandom, dipping a toe into the worlds of Austen cosplay, Austen fanfic, Austen profic etc, without getting very detailed about any of it.
However, I did like Yaffe’s summation of Austen’s widespread appeal. “The rich diversity of responses to Austen captures something real about her - the depth and complexity of her writings, which, like diamonds held up to sunlight, reflect something different from every angle. Her stories are not blank canvases onto which we project ourselves; they are complicated, ambiguous pictures of lived reality. We all find ourselves in her because, in a sense, she contains us all.”
I’ve returned to the Eleanor Estes’ Moffat books, continuing the series with Rufus M.It’s poignant to realize that Estes was writing this retrospective about the end of World War I while the world was still in the thick of World War II.
What I’m Reading Now
Nathalia Holt’s The Queens of Animation: The Untold Story of the Women Who Transformed the World of Disney and Made Cinematic History languished on my to-read pile for ages, but I’ve finally begun it and I’ve learned so much not only about Disney’s female animators, but also about the sheer process of animation, which I must confess I always vaguely envisioned working like one of those flip books where you turn the pages real fast and the sketches appear to move.
(Also, there were at least two different female Disney animators in the 1930s & 40s with powerful interests in aviation. Someone ought to inform Elizabeth Wein.)
I’ve also begun Mary Norris’s Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, a memoir about Norris’s time as copy-editor at the New Yorker and also general musings about grammar. “Sing to me, o Muse, of that small minority of men who are secure enough in their masculinity to use the feminine third-person singular!”
What I Plan to Read Next
I’ve been beavering away at the story I mentioned last week, the one with the boarding school friends who reconnect after much suffering in World War I, and I have decided that in this pursuit I obviously must read the sequel to David Blaize (although apparently David Blaize and the Blue Door is in fact a prequel and also a fantasy novel even though David Blaize had no fantasy elements? Weird flex, but okay), and also I have REALIZED that this is the perfect opportunity for me to read all sorts of books that I’ve meant to read for ages because they influenced Tolkien and/or C. S. Lewis. Obviously what the readers of m/m romances want is for the characters to have vociferous opinions about William Morris’s The House of the Wolfings.
“We’re not programmed to register more than a hundred corpses. In heaps they simply become a landscape feature.”
I finished Margaret Atwood’s The Tent, a book of short stories - flash fiction, really, in many cases, some of them are barely more than a page. I must admit that I often wanted them to be longer, for there to be more to sink my teeth into - but they do share with Atwood’s novels that razor-edged humor, the wry dark way of looking at the world.
I was hoping that Deborah Yaffe’s Among the Janeites: A Journey through the World of Jane Austen Fandom would be something along the lines of a detailed fandom wank guide: allll about the Fanny Price wars! Not to mention a more critical attitude toward Arnie Perlstein, whom she notes is such an obnoxious commentator that message board moderators have been forced to warn each other about him, but this is mentioned almost as an aside. Instead it’s more of a general tour of the many different types of Austen fandom, dipping a toe into the worlds of Austen cosplay, Austen fanfic, Austen profic etc, without getting very detailed about any of it.
However, I did like Yaffe’s summation of Austen’s widespread appeal. “The rich diversity of responses to Austen captures something real about her - the depth and complexity of her writings, which, like diamonds held up to sunlight, reflect something different from every angle. Her stories are not blank canvases onto which we project ourselves; they are complicated, ambiguous pictures of lived reality. We all find ourselves in her because, in a sense, she contains us all.”
I’ve returned to the Eleanor Estes’ Moffat books, continuing the series with Rufus M.It’s poignant to realize that Estes was writing this retrospective about the end of World War I while the world was still in the thick of World War II.
“Look!” he exclaimed in excitement. And all the Moffats drew around the stove and looked in. They looked at the word that stood out on the burnt sheet of newspaper. In tremulous, glowing letters lit by the last glow from that burning paper, as though it were seen through the water of an ocean, was the one word PEACE, the headline of Joey’s newspaper.
Mama looked at the word and the children looked too, silently. Then Mama said again, “Yes, you know what that means, don’t you? It means better times are coming now, for all the people.”
And she took the poker and gently scattered the charred fragments of the newspaper and of the papers on which the children had written, so that all the dreams and wishes and plans of the Moffats were gathered in a little pile in the middle of the stove where they soon were wafted up the chimney and became part of the air.
What I’m Reading Now
Nathalia Holt’s The Queens of Animation: The Untold Story of the Women Who Transformed the World of Disney and Made Cinematic History languished on my to-read pile for ages, but I’ve finally begun it and I’ve learned so much not only about Disney’s female animators, but also about the sheer process of animation, which I must confess I always vaguely envisioned working like one of those flip books where you turn the pages real fast and the sketches appear to move.
(Also, there were at least two different female Disney animators in the 1930s & 40s with powerful interests in aviation. Someone ought to inform Elizabeth Wein.)
I’ve also begun Mary Norris’s Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, a memoir about Norris’s time as copy-editor at the New Yorker and also general musings about grammar. “Sing to me, o Muse, of that small minority of men who are secure enough in their masculinity to use the feminine third-person singular!”
What I Plan to Read Next
I’ve been beavering away at the story I mentioned last week, the one with the boarding school friends who reconnect after much suffering in World War I, and I have decided that in this pursuit I obviously must read the sequel to David Blaize (although apparently David Blaize and the Blue Door is in fact a prequel and also a fantasy novel even though David Blaize had no fantasy elements? Weird flex, but okay), and also I have REALIZED that this is the perfect opportunity for me to read all sorts of books that I’ve meant to read for ages because they influenced Tolkien and/or C. S. Lewis. Obviously what the readers of m/m romances want is for the characters to have vociferous opinions about William Morris’s The House of the Wolfings.
