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Wednesday Reading Meme
Jan. 3rd, 2018 09:41 amWhat 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!
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!
