A Shining Wednesday On A Hill
Dec. 4th, 2019 11:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evelyn_bWhat I've Finished Reading
Breaking and Entering by Joy Williams is a novel that feels more like a short story that got long, maybe because there's a helpless passenger-side quality to all its events, and because it's more about the feeling of standing around in Florida while birds die in your line of sight than it is about one thing leading to another. But also maybe just because it's shorter and more opaque than some of the other novels I've been reading. It's about a couple of drifters, teenage lovers grown up badly, who break into rich people's houses while their owners are away. One of them, Willie, likes to leave little piles of his own hair in the middle of coffee tables or beds, as a calling card. One day the owner is home after all, and everything crumbles under a barrage of weird-ass arthouse monologues and violence, but in much slower motion than you may be imagining.
What I'm Reading Now
My great new friend William Dean Howells is never more of his time than when he's frowning sadly about the "streams of filth" that have been running through the entire history of human literature prior to the nineteenth century, and optimistically speculating that as "the animal" is more and more subordinated to the moral in man, new work will get purer and purer, and bowlderized popular editions of randy old classics will become the undisputed norm. Will, you absolute sweetheart, I'm not even a little bit sorry that this dream never became a reality, but if you want to rant about how fart jokes aren't funny for up to ten minutes at a time, I'm here for you.
The chapters of My Literary Passions are devoted each to a different writer or group of writers, with an occassional "Non-Literary Episode" or "Various Preferences." Some of the authors are very familiar, some I know only because LM Montgomery read them at some point, and some are totally obscure to me. Have you heard of Ik Marvel, "the gentle and kindly Ik Marvel, whose Reveries of a Bachelor and whose Dream Life the young people of that day were reading with a tender rapture which will not be altogether surprising, I dare say, to the young people of this"? I had not.
Speaking of passions, Andrew Lang's defense of Walter Scott in the Library is so passionate that I'll probably end up trying to read Walter Scott again. This has happened at least five times with five different Scott fans and it never works out for me. But I'm slightly different each time, so you never know.
I'm also still reading Lilith's Brood, which has only gotten more lecture-dense since the humans split into sterile "resister" and conditonally fertile "Trader" groups in their carefully recreated rainforest on the refurbished (but still doomed, it turns out) Earth. Still good, but a little less viscerally upsetting and a little more traditionally philisophical - in spite of the tentacles having thoroughly pervaded everyone's business.
And Blood Heir, a YA fantasy that answers the age-old question, "What if we did Anastasia, only with spooky blood-bending powers instead of the hemophilia gene, and set it in a cunningly disguised Fantasy Not Russia so that no one nags us about blah blah real people history?" I love this idea, and the fact that the Fantasy Not Russia is called "The Cyrilian Empire" and is chock full of apostrophes, and I like the parts of the worldbuilding that are the most obviously based on big gold-highlighted fairy-tale illustrations (snow-covered birch forests full of silvery shadows and sleek carnivores), but so far I haven't had much luck with the plot or the characters, and I'm not sure why. Maybe it's just the "YA style" I keep hearing about.
What I Plan to Read Next
The Rebel Angels is the second-to-last book in the 99 Novels. When I finish the 99, I've got a memoir by Anthony Burgess to read. Beyond that and some work stuff, I don't know! "Randomness from my bookshelves" would be the most responsible answer, as I'm still trying to clear off some space for non-books on the shelves. But I'm also tempted to try one of my buddy William Dean Howell's morally sound modern novels. He wrote a lot!
Breaking and Entering by Joy Williams is a novel that feels more like a short story that got long, maybe because there's a helpless passenger-side quality to all its events, and because it's more about the feeling of standing around in Florida while birds die in your line of sight than it is about one thing leading to another. But also maybe just because it's shorter and more opaque than some of the other novels I've been reading. It's about a couple of drifters, teenage lovers grown up badly, who break into rich people's houses while their owners are away. One of them, Willie, likes to leave little piles of his own hair in the middle of coffee tables or beds, as a calling card. One day the owner is home after all, and everything crumbles under a barrage of weird-ass arthouse monologues and violence, but in much slower motion than you may be imagining.
What I'm Reading Now
My great new friend William Dean Howells is never more of his time than when he's frowning sadly about the "streams of filth" that have been running through the entire history of human literature prior to the nineteenth century, and optimistically speculating that as "the animal" is more and more subordinated to the moral in man, new work will get purer and purer, and bowlderized popular editions of randy old classics will become the undisputed norm. Will, you absolute sweetheart, I'm not even a little bit sorry that this dream never became a reality, but if you want to rant about how fart jokes aren't funny for up to ten minutes at a time, I'm here for you.
The chapters of My Literary Passions are devoted each to a different writer or group of writers, with an occassional "Non-Literary Episode" or "Various Preferences." Some of the authors are very familiar, some I know only because LM Montgomery read them at some point, and some are totally obscure to me. Have you heard of Ik Marvel, "the gentle and kindly Ik Marvel, whose Reveries of a Bachelor and whose Dream Life the young people of that day were reading with a tender rapture which will not be altogether surprising, I dare say, to the young people of this"? I had not.
I dare say I should find their pose now a little old-fashioned. I believe it was rather full of sighs, and shrugs, and starts, expressed in dashes, and asterisks, and exclamations, but I am sure that the feeling was the genuine and manly sort which is of all times and always the latest wear.
Speaking of passions, Andrew Lang's defense of Walter Scott in the Library is so passionate that I'll probably end up trying to read Walter Scott again. This has happened at least five times with five different Scott fans and it never works out for me. But I'm slightly different each time, so you never know.
I'm also still reading Lilith's Brood, which has only gotten more lecture-dense since the humans split into sterile "resister" and conditonally fertile "Trader" groups in their carefully recreated rainforest on the refurbished (but still doomed, it turns out) Earth. Still good, but a little less viscerally upsetting and a little more traditionally philisophical - in spite of the tentacles having thoroughly pervaded everyone's business.
And Blood Heir, a YA fantasy that answers the age-old question, "What if we did Anastasia, only with spooky blood-bending powers instead of the hemophilia gene, and set it in a cunningly disguised Fantasy Not Russia so that no one nags us about blah blah real people history?" I love this idea, and the fact that the Fantasy Not Russia is called "The Cyrilian Empire" and is chock full of apostrophes, and I like the parts of the worldbuilding that are the most obviously based on big gold-highlighted fairy-tale illustrations (snow-covered birch forests full of silvery shadows and sleek carnivores), but so far I haven't had much luck with the plot or the characters, and I'm not sure why. Maybe it's just the "YA style" I keep hearing about.
What I Plan to Read Next
The Rebel Angels is the second-to-last book in the 99 Novels. When I finish the 99, I've got a memoir by Anthony Burgess to read. Beyond that and some work stuff, I don't know! "Randomness from my bookshelves" would be the most responsible answer, as I'm still trying to clear off some space for non-books on the shelves. But I'm also tempted to try one of my buddy William Dean Howell's morally sound modern novels. He wrote a lot!
