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Wednesday Reading Meme
Oct. 9th, 2019 09:03 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Who just finished Kristin Lavransdatter? ME! *spikes football* It wasn’t always an enjoyable reading experience as I read, but I’m glad to have read it now that it’s done: it gives such a rich vision of medieval Norwegian society that you could almost step into the page and drink ale in the hearth house.
This is not to say that I would go around recommending it willy-nilly, because there are also times when it is a slog (Kristin and Erlend have many variations on the same problem - and you have to give Sigrid Undset this, she comes up with MANY new variations - but it’s always the same basic problem. Erlend is reckless and irresponsible, and Kristin can neither forgive him nor break from him.
I was so close to finishing William Dean Howells’ My Literary Passions last week that it only took me about fifteen minutes to wrap it up, but I’m still sad that it’s over. His musings about the book-reading life are just so relatable! Like this comment, after he confesses to a fondness to some long-forgotten trashy novel:
“Perhaps I shall be able to whisper the readers behind my hand that I have never yet read the Aeneid of Virgil; the Georgics, yes; but the Aeneid, no. Some time, however, I expect to read it and to like it immensely. That is often the case with things that I have held aloof from indefinitely.”
Who among us doesn’t have such a book floating somewhere in our life-time reading plans?
I also finished Paul Watkins’ Stand before Your God: An American Schoolboy in England, and my days of thinking that the English boarding school system sounds like one of the worst things that people have ever voluntarily inflicted on their children are certainly coming to a middle.
What I’m Reading Now
In 1903, Jean Webster visited Italy, and like many Anglophone writers found it impossible to resist setting a novel there. (I can throw no shade; I’ve done it myself.) Webster wrote two: Jerry Junior, a light comic novel, and The Wheat Princess, which is the last book I need to read before I’ve encompassed Webster’s entire oeuvre.
So far it seems pretty solidly second-tier Webster; on par with Jerry Junior, certainly not reaching the heights of Daddy-Long-Legs or When Patty Went to College. But perhaps because it’s her final book for me, reading it has made me sad that she died so young: she has a fairly varied output (which is part of the reason the quality is so varied, probably) and who knows what new and interesting things she would have tried if she got the chance?
I’ve also begun Edward L. Ayers’ The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America, which starts with Gettysburg and will stretch, presumably, through Reconstruction. I’m still in the Gettysburg part, and so far I’m really appreciating the way that Ayers makes battles make sense - not in the sense that he gives you a blow-by-blow of who is charging where, but as an overall part of the war, how battles are shaped not only by generals but by the sheer physical facts of the terrain and equipment and the available amount of food.
In a way it reminds me of Tolstoy in War and Peace (exasperating though it is to praise Tolstoy’s Theory of History in War and Peace) - of his emphasis on the physical limitations of armies. It’s easy to say, in hindsight, that Meade ought to have cut off Lee’s retreat (just as Kutuzov ought to have cut off Napoleon’s), but the fact that this would have been militarily advantageous doesn’t change the fact that an army can reach a stage of such exhaustion that neither its horses or its men are physically capable of going fast enough to cut off another army’s retreat.
What I Plan to Read Next
It’s October, which makes it the right book to read Shirley Jackson, am I right? (All months are the right months to read Shirley Jackson, but October is even more right than most.) The Road through the Wall is the only novel of hers I haven’t read, so I’ve put a hold on it at the library.
I probably ought to read some of her short stories too (at very least “The Lottery”!), but - confession time - I very rarely read short stories. It’s funny, because I love short books (this is one of the reasons I continue to read lots of children’s books), but somehow this has not translated into an interest in short stories.
Who just finished Kristin Lavransdatter? ME! *spikes football* It wasn’t always an enjoyable reading experience as I read, but I’m glad to have read it now that it’s done: it gives such a rich vision of medieval Norwegian society that you could almost step into the page and drink ale in the hearth house.
This is not to say that I would go around recommending it willy-nilly, because there are also times when it is a slog (Kristin and Erlend have many variations on the same problem - and you have to give Sigrid Undset this, she comes up with MANY new variations - but it’s always the same basic problem. Erlend is reckless and irresponsible, and Kristin can neither forgive him nor break from him.
I was so close to finishing William Dean Howells’ My Literary Passions last week that it only took me about fifteen minutes to wrap it up, but I’m still sad that it’s over. His musings about the book-reading life are just so relatable! Like this comment, after he confesses to a fondness to some long-forgotten trashy novel:
“Perhaps I shall be able to whisper the readers behind my hand that I have never yet read the Aeneid of Virgil; the Georgics, yes; but the Aeneid, no. Some time, however, I expect to read it and to like it immensely. That is often the case with things that I have held aloof from indefinitely.”
Who among us doesn’t have such a book floating somewhere in our life-time reading plans?
I also finished Paul Watkins’ Stand before Your God: An American Schoolboy in England, and my days of thinking that the English boarding school system sounds like one of the worst things that people have ever voluntarily inflicted on their children are certainly coming to a middle.
What I’m Reading Now
In 1903, Jean Webster visited Italy, and like many Anglophone writers found it impossible to resist setting a novel there. (I can throw no shade; I’ve done it myself.) Webster wrote two: Jerry Junior, a light comic novel, and The Wheat Princess, which is the last book I need to read before I’ve encompassed Webster’s entire oeuvre.
So far it seems pretty solidly second-tier Webster; on par with Jerry Junior, certainly not reaching the heights of Daddy-Long-Legs or When Patty Went to College. But perhaps because it’s her final book for me, reading it has made me sad that she died so young: she has a fairly varied output (which is part of the reason the quality is so varied, probably) and who knows what new and interesting things she would have tried if she got the chance?
I’ve also begun Edward L. Ayers’ The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America, which starts with Gettysburg and will stretch, presumably, through Reconstruction. I’m still in the Gettysburg part, and so far I’m really appreciating the way that Ayers makes battles make sense - not in the sense that he gives you a blow-by-blow of who is charging where, but as an overall part of the war, how battles are shaped not only by generals but by the sheer physical facts of the terrain and equipment and the available amount of food.
In a way it reminds me of Tolstoy in War and Peace (exasperating though it is to praise Tolstoy’s Theory of History in War and Peace) - of his emphasis on the physical limitations of armies. It’s easy to say, in hindsight, that Meade ought to have cut off Lee’s retreat (just as Kutuzov ought to have cut off Napoleon’s), but the fact that this would have been militarily advantageous doesn’t change the fact that an army can reach a stage of such exhaustion that neither its horses or its men are physically capable of going fast enough to cut off another army’s retreat.
What I Plan to Read Next
It’s October, which makes it the right book to read Shirley Jackson, am I right? (All months are the right months to read Shirley Jackson, but October is even more right than most.) The Road through the Wall is the only novel of hers I haven’t read, so I’ve put a hold on it at the library.
I probably ought to read some of her short stories too (at very least “The Lottery”!), but - confession time - I very rarely read short stories. It’s funny, because I love short books (this is one of the reasons I continue to read lots of children’s books), but somehow this has not translated into an interest in short stories.
