What is the Wednesday Coming To?
Oct. 10th, 2018 11:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evelyn_bWhat I've Finished Reading
. . . is my favorite line from Ulysses. At least, it's the one I've quoted the most often in the past two weeks.
I don't think I can say of Ulysses what I normally say of Gigantic Books What Intimidate the People, that it's just a victim of its own success and if you read two pages together you'll see that it doesn't deserve its intimidating rep. Much more than War and Peace, that amiable soap opera, or even Moby Dick, it really is a bit of a beast. If you are used to reading quickly, you'll be forced to slow down, and sometimes when you've slowed down you'll find yourself wondering why you've been led here, into this thicket of puns, until the thicket clears. Joyce does this over and over: he provokes the reader's impatience for what seems like an unjustifiably long time, then rewards it with drowsy clarity and sudden heartbreak. Being a genuinely difficult book doesn't mean it's a book you shouldn't read. Probably everyone should read a genuinely difficult book at least once, and this is a good one if you haven't hit your quota yet. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll wonder if it really needed to be quite this long (my money is on yes, but I'm prejudiced in favor of length).
I kept on being surprised by Little Women. When I had only read three chapters, I felt impatient and a little put-upon, but once I had read five chapters, it was impossible to stop until I had read the whole thing. It stays preachy throughout, which has its benefits as well as its drawbacks. The March girls are total sweethearts, and their love interests are almost equally total in their sweetheartedness, and sometimes it's nice to read about people who enjoy each other's company and want to make each other happy. Sometimes the sermonizing is a perfectly believable expression of these carefully instructed and earnest characters - I believed in the sincerity of Professor Bhaer's forlorn crusade against trashy fiction, for example, even if I don't agree - and then it's fine. Sometimes it goes careening into the syrup vats in a way that seriously disrupts the illusion of reality, as when the girls chant "We will, Marmee!" in apparent unison after some tiresome exhortation or another. But the characters survive these saccharine showers, to the credit of the same author who has chosen thus to drench them.
What I Haven't Been Reading
Were you wondering if the TV version of Olivia Manning's double trilogy about the Pringles, Fortunes of War, is any good? You don't have to wonder any more - it's excellent! (It's also possible I just think it's excellent because it prolongs my time with the Pringles). When I saw that Guy and Harriet were played by Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson, I was worried that they would have too much chemistry for my decidedly non-incandescent darlings, but I underestimated their acting ability. Branagh is especially good at being vaguely charming and stubborn and looking like a big clumsy Bezukhovian teddybear even though he and Thompson are actually almost exactly the same size. Everything moves a bit too quickly, but that's TV for you. The large cast is reasonably well-handled, the production values are good, and all of Harriet's would-be affairs are (so far) even oilier and sad-sackier than they are in the books. They've all just left for Cairo in the overcrowded evacuation boat, so we're about at the halfway mark.
What I'm Reading Now
Invisible Cities is a book about cities by Italo Calvino. At first I couldn't appreciate it properly because I was too disappointed that I hadn't read it when I was 19 or 15, when it could have ruined my life properly, but I can't very well blame a book for that, and it's grown on me since. More on this later.
What I Plan to Read Next
I took a trip and bought some books, including 99 Novels future reading: The Unlimited Dream Company by J. G. Ballard and The Sleep of Reason by my perfectly acceptable non-nemesis, C.P. Snow. There is also a new Ruth Rendell called The Veiled One, with an ominous closeup of some knitting needles bearing a single drop of . . . could it be. . . blood?!?
When I bought The Unlimited Dream Company, the resident Bookstore Guy noticed it and said, "That's a great book!" I said I'd heard good things and was looking forward to reading it, and we had a nice brief conversation about books. Then he said he was always glad to see people reading good books and that he hoped the cultural pendulum would swing back toward READING and away from THE INTERNET.
I didn't have the presence of mind to say THAT'S A FALSE DICHOTOMY because my brain isn't fast enough on its feet to argue with Bookstore Guys or anyone else. Nevertheless, it's a false dichotomy. I'm glad you're all here reading on the internet with me (even if I don't come around as often as I'd like).
We can't change the country, so let us change the subject.
. . . is my favorite line from Ulysses. At least, it's the one I've quoted the most often in the past two weeks.
I don't think I can say of Ulysses what I normally say of Gigantic Books What Intimidate the People, that it's just a victim of its own success and if you read two pages together you'll see that it doesn't deserve its intimidating rep. Much more than War and Peace, that amiable soap opera, or even Moby Dick, it really is a bit of a beast. If you are used to reading quickly, you'll be forced to slow down, and sometimes when you've slowed down you'll find yourself wondering why you've been led here, into this thicket of puns, until the thicket clears. Joyce does this over and over: he provokes the reader's impatience for what seems like an unjustifiably long time, then rewards it with drowsy clarity and sudden heartbreak. Being a genuinely difficult book doesn't mean it's a book you shouldn't read. Probably everyone should read a genuinely difficult book at least once, and this is a good one if you haven't hit your quota yet. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll wonder if it really needed to be quite this long (my money is on yes, but I'm prejudiced in favor of length).
I kept on being surprised by Little Women. When I had only read three chapters, I felt impatient and a little put-upon, but once I had read five chapters, it was impossible to stop until I had read the whole thing. It stays preachy throughout, which has its benefits as well as its drawbacks. The March girls are total sweethearts, and their love interests are almost equally total in their sweetheartedness, and sometimes it's nice to read about people who enjoy each other's company and want to make each other happy. Sometimes the sermonizing is a perfectly believable expression of these carefully instructed and earnest characters - I believed in the sincerity of Professor Bhaer's forlorn crusade against trashy fiction, for example, even if I don't agree - and then it's fine. Sometimes it goes careening into the syrup vats in a way that seriously disrupts the illusion of reality, as when the girls chant "We will, Marmee!" in apparent unison after some tiresome exhortation or another. But the characters survive these saccharine showers, to the credit of the same author who has chosen thus to drench them.
What I Haven't Been Reading
Were you wondering if the TV version of Olivia Manning's double trilogy about the Pringles, Fortunes of War, is any good? You don't have to wonder any more - it's excellent! (It's also possible I just think it's excellent because it prolongs my time with the Pringles). When I saw that Guy and Harriet were played by Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson, I was worried that they would have too much chemistry for my decidedly non-incandescent darlings, but I underestimated their acting ability. Branagh is especially good at being vaguely charming and stubborn and looking like a big clumsy Bezukhovian teddybear even though he and Thompson are actually almost exactly the same size. Everything moves a bit too quickly, but that's TV for you. The large cast is reasonably well-handled, the production values are good, and all of Harriet's would-be affairs are (so far) even oilier and sad-sackier than they are in the books. They've all just left for Cairo in the overcrowded evacuation boat, so we're about at the halfway mark.
What I'm Reading Now
"I have also thought of a model city from which I deduce all the others," Marco answered. "It is a city made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions. If such a city is the most improbable, by reducing the number of abnormal elements, we increase the probability that the city really exists. So I have only to subtract exceptions from my model, and in what ever direction I proceed, I ill arrive at one of the cities which, always as an exception, exist. But I cannot force my operation beyond a certain limit: I would achieve cities too probable to be real."
Invisible Cities is a book about cities by Italo Calvino. At first I couldn't appreciate it properly because I was too disappointed that I hadn't read it when I was 19 or 15, when it could have ruined my life properly, but I can't very well blame a book for that, and it's grown on me since. More on this later.
What I Plan to Read Next
I took a trip and bought some books, including 99 Novels future reading: The Unlimited Dream Company by J. G. Ballard and The Sleep of Reason by my perfectly acceptable non-nemesis, C.P. Snow. There is also a new Ruth Rendell called The Veiled One, with an ominous closeup of some knitting needles bearing a single drop of . . . could it be. . . blood?!?
When I bought The Unlimited Dream Company, the resident Bookstore Guy noticed it and said, "That's a great book!" I said I'd heard good things and was looking forward to reading it, and we had a nice brief conversation about books. Then he said he was always glad to see people reading good books and that he hoped the cultural pendulum would swing back toward READING and away from THE INTERNET.
I didn't have the presence of mind to say THAT'S A FALSE DICHOTOMY because my brain isn't fast enough on its feet to argue with Bookstore Guys or anyone else. Nevertheless, it's a false dichotomy. I'm glad you're all here reading on the internet with me (even if I don't come around as often as I'd like).
no subject
Date: 2018-10-10 08:03 pm (UTC)Aw, cool! I'm very glad. And Emma Thompson and Kenneth Brannagh? Even better...
no subject
Date: 2018-10-11 01:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-10-11 01:20 am (UTC)I'm also fascinated by the fact that the Pringles have merited a television series - possibly not fascinated enough to watch it, even though it does star Emma Thompson... although... it does star Emma Thompson...
Maybe it will go on my "I will watch this if life throws an opportunity my way because why not' list.
I feel that C. P. Snow is being damned with faint praise here. He'd probably really like to be your nemesis and here you are, trumpeting to all and sundry that he's basically a non-entity.
no subject
Date: 2018-10-11 02:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-10-13 10:21 am (UTC)I love the internet AND books, what now Bookstore Guy.