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Wednesday With Good Company (On Thursday)
Feb. 18th, 2021 05:27 pmWhat I've Finished Reading
Our Prize Book: Heirs to the Kingdom is a Methodist Sunday School gift book full of poetry and dead children. Ostensibly it's a children's book: the print is large, the language is simple - and probably a number of pious or morbid or unspeakably bored children devoured these with some pleasure back in 1874, when it was new - but its appeal is not obvious to the layman. It consists of brief beseeching sermons and briefer stories, which are mostly about how statistically likely its readers are to die young. As a Prize Book, it was probably given to the winner of a Scripture-memorizing contest or similar. This is part of the built-in mental furniture of classic children's authors like L.M. Montgomery (the ranks of the morbid and the bored) and so, in a way, it's part of my own. Sadly, that doesn't make it very good reading.
What I'm Reading Now
I haven't had a lot of time for reading, because it's the busy season at work again. Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell novels are keeping me up late anyway, even though the characters aren't all that likeable and some of them (miscellaneous skuldugging houses of this and that) are hard to tell apart. I blew right through Wolf Hall and now it's the middle of Bring Up the Bodies and Henry is carefully floating the idea that maybe he was bewitched and that's why he burned so many bridges just to marry that snaky Boleyn person who isn't even all that nice to him if you think about it. Henry is such a tragic baby blimp at all times, and because he's accidentally king of England instead of some rando in his mother's basement, the tragedy is everyone else's and Henry just keeps bobbing along through the clouds, wondering why everything has to be so hard.
What I Plan to Read Next
The sequel to The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, finally arrived, and the intermittent sci-fi book club was put off until next month, so I still have time to read it! Also I might try to catch up on the past few weeks, if I don't forget again.
And now, dear children, I trust you will not think I have told you these sad stories to make you afraid of death. I have rather told them to you that, being reminded of the shortness and uncertainty of life, you might so prepare to meet its end as to have no farther cause for fear.
Our Prize Book: Heirs to the Kingdom is a Methodist Sunday School gift book full of poetry and dead children. Ostensibly it's a children's book: the print is large, the language is simple - and probably a number of pious or morbid or unspeakably bored children devoured these with some pleasure back in 1874, when it was new - but its appeal is not obvious to the layman. It consists of brief beseeching sermons and briefer stories, which are mostly about how statistically likely its readers are to die young. As a Prize Book, it was probably given to the winner of a Scripture-memorizing contest or similar. This is part of the built-in mental furniture of classic children's authors like L.M. Montgomery (the ranks of the morbid and the bored) and so, in a way, it's part of my own. Sadly, that doesn't make it very good reading.
What I'm Reading Now
I haven't had a lot of time for reading, because it's the busy season at work again. Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell novels are keeping me up late anyway, even though the characters aren't all that likeable and some of them (miscellaneous skuldugging houses of this and that) are hard to tell apart. I blew right through Wolf Hall and now it's the middle of Bring Up the Bodies and Henry is carefully floating the idea that maybe he was bewitched and that's why he burned so many bridges just to marry that snaky Boleyn person who isn't even all that nice to him if you think about it. Henry is such a tragic baby blimp at all times, and because he's accidentally king of England instead of some rando in his mother's basement, the tragedy is everyone else's and Henry just keeps bobbing along through the clouds, wondering why everything has to be so hard.
What I Plan to Read Next
The sequel to The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, finally arrived, and the intermittent sci-fi book club was put off until next month, so I still have time to read it! Also I might try to catch up on the past few weeks, if I don't forget again.
