![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Wednesday Reading Meme
Jan. 20th, 2021 07:24 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
It was curious, but the smell of coffee made me more cheerful. I knew that from the war; it was never the big things that consoled one - it was always the unimportant, the little things.
This is an unusually consoling quote for Erich Maria Remarque’s Three Comrades, which is mostly a chronicle of despair: our hero Robert starts the book on his thirtieth birthday totting up the dead-end jobs he’s held since the end of the Great War, and ends ( spoilers )
I FINALLY read Nora Ellen Groce’s Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness on Martha’s Vineyard, which I’ve meant to read ever since high school because my biology textbook included an excerpt. It was worth the wait: this is a short, engrossing book, which discusses both the likely hereditary pattern behind the high incidence of deafness on Martha’s Vineyard in the 18th and 19th centuries (a recessive gene) and the social consequences of its common occurrence, which was that, well, everyone on Martha’s Vineyard spoke sign language.
The result was that deaf Vineyarders were fully integrated into the community, both socially and economically. Groce’s interlocutors often had difficulty remembering who was deaf, in the way that someone in a modern-day community might have trouble remembering precisely who wore glasses: it’s a fact about someone, but not as important or memorable as “He had that really great fishing boat!”
Deaf Vineyarders married at the same rates as hearing islanders (often to hearing partners), earned their living at the same trades (except whaling, possibly because whaling ships tended to get a large proportion of their crews off-Island?), and had similar economic fates: a few earned their fortunes, most got by, and some sunk into penury, just like their hearing counterparts.
I also read Ruth Stiles Gannett’s My Father’s Dragon, but I didn’t particularly like it. Perhaps the whimsicality of it would have appealed to me more if I’d read it as a youngster?
What I’m Reading Now
I have the horrible feeling that Leo in Mary Renault’s The Friendly Young Ladies is going to end up paired off with Peter, who is the most obnoxious of the available candidates. He makes a habit of pretending to fall in love with his lonely female patients, on the theory that this will cheer them up and speed their recovery; Leo objects (but thinks, as she does so, “he’s a far better human being than I am,” which could only possibly be true if Leo is a serial killer) that women “don’t really enjoy being helped and done good to,” as if Peter is in fact helping and doing good, rather than essentially lying to and misleading these poor women out of, at best, pity, and at worst as a way of amusing himself (Peter would strenuously deny that characterization but it’s absolutely visible in the way he thinks). As if a man would enjoy it if a pretty lady doctor felt so sorry for him that she pretended to fall in love with him till his vital signs bucked up?
What I Plan to Read Next
Is it time for Wilkie Collins’ Armadale? It might be time for Armadale.
It was curious, but the smell of coffee made me more cheerful. I knew that from the war; it was never the big things that consoled one - it was always the unimportant, the little things.
This is an unusually consoling quote for Erich Maria Remarque’s Three Comrades, which is mostly a chronicle of despair: our hero Robert starts the book on his thirtieth birthday totting up the dead-end jobs he’s held since the end of the Great War, and ends ( spoilers )
I FINALLY read Nora Ellen Groce’s Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness on Martha’s Vineyard, which I’ve meant to read ever since high school because my biology textbook included an excerpt. It was worth the wait: this is a short, engrossing book, which discusses both the likely hereditary pattern behind the high incidence of deafness on Martha’s Vineyard in the 18th and 19th centuries (a recessive gene) and the social consequences of its common occurrence, which was that, well, everyone on Martha’s Vineyard spoke sign language.
The result was that deaf Vineyarders were fully integrated into the community, both socially and economically. Groce’s interlocutors often had difficulty remembering who was deaf, in the way that someone in a modern-day community might have trouble remembering precisely who wore glasses: it’s a fact about someone, but not as important or memorable as “He had that really great fishing boat!”
Deaf Vineyarders married at the same rates as hearing islanders (often to hearing partners), earned their living at the same trades (except whaling, possibly because whaling ships tended to get a large proportion of their crews off-Island?), and had similar economic fates: a few earned their fortunes, most got by, and some sunk into penury, just like their hearing counterparts.
I also read Ruth Stiles Gannett’s My Father’s Dragon, but I didn’t particularly like it. Perhaps the whimsicality of it would have appealed to me more if I’d read it as a youngster?
What I’m Reading Now
I have the horrible feeling that Leo in Mary Renault’s The Friendly Young Ladies is going to end up paired off with Peter, who is the most obnoxious of the available candidates. He makes a habit of pretending to fall in love with his lonely female patients, on the theory that this will cheer them up and speed their recovery; Leo objects (but thinks, as she does so, “he’s a far better human being than I am,” which could only possibly be true if Leo is a serial killer) that women “don’t really enjoy being helped and done good to,” as if Peter is in fact helping and doing good, rather than essentially lying to and misleading these poor women out of, at best, pity, and at worst as a way of amusing himself (Peter would strenuously deny that characterization but it’s absolutely visible in the way he thinks). As if a man would enjoy it if a pretty lady doctor felt so sorry for him that she pretended to fall in love with him till his vital signs bucked up?
What I Plan to Read Next
Is it time for Wilkie Collins’ Armadale? It might be time for Armadale.
