What the Hell Am I Reading Wednesday
Feb. 27th, 2019 10:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evelyn_bWhat I've Finished Reading
Every time I think the Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight has finally mercifully abandoned the politics angle and settled down to a nice relaxing round of farming and moping, Phil throws in another soppy Hitler aside, just so you don't forget whose book you're reading. So about a third of the way through Lucifer Before Sunrise, as the introduction to a sweeping description of literal floods in England, we get "The great spring-tide of human movement that was Adolf Hitler's heart and brain striving to create unity in a fragmentated continent seemed at last to have lapped itself to stillness: the moment when a scarce perceptive tremor passes through the immense sheet of water that is a tidal flow; when silently, almost stealthily, it begins to lapse." That is a reasonably representative example of HW's writing style in general and the sort of tone he wants to take about his totally well-meaning fallen angel Hitler in particular. He might have done all right in the nineteenth century, writing great-man nonsense about Napoleon - at least, present-day readers would be willing to cut him more slack about it. I'm not convinced that he would have felt any more at home back then than he does in 1943 or 1967.
Near the end of the book, Phil's penchant for excessive and inappropriate Hitler quoting is brought in as evidence for his wife Lucy's divorce suit. I laughed, I cried. Mostly I laughed. The divorce is a blessing in disguise because it allows Phil to give up trying to build a functioning farm for his family to inherit and go live in a cottage and try to write an important novel about "the age" and how hard farming is, like he's always wanted.
What I'm Reading Now
The world of books is wide and also includes Lillian Jackson Braun's The Cat Who Had 14 Tales, which is 14 short, light stories about cats solving mysteries by being cats, as well as killing a few people here and there for great cat justice. I never finished the one Lillian Jackson Braun cat mystery I tried to read (several years ago) because I disliked the human POV guy too intensely and couldn't handle all his conversations eventually being about cats. The stories here worked much better for me: either they're told from the POV of a cat or they're short anecdotes about memorable cats, so there's no suffocating feeling of cats and cat jokes being forced into normally cat-free situations in order to provide a cat connection on every page. This collection was published in 1988, but about half the stories in it were first printed in the 1960s, so as well as being light-hearted fun it's also a small catalog of changing attitudes in cat ownership. (There is also a fantastically stupid joke about cat yuppies).
The world of books also includes the ENORMOUS last volume of Joseph Frank's five-volume Dostoevsky biography and Elsie Disnmore - which I've decided to give another try in book form, now that I've been baptized in the cheesy fire of Elise's Girlhood. It's easy to see why this book attracted so much derision and also why it was such a hit with a subset of young readers. Elsie suffers endlessly from being pretty, which she can't help at all, and talented, which means she is always being crushed between the hideous embarrassment of performing and the unbearable shame of not being able to perform. Her father, Horace, is a ridiculously hapless young monster who keeps willfully misunderstanding Elsie and resenting her for it. Everything is incredibly over the top humiliation and despair, and the whole book is a machine designed to crush Elsie's little world over and over. In the scene I just read, Elsie would really like to hug her father, but he just withdrew his arm and picked up the paper! And just as she's standing there, making up her mind to do it anyway (but terrified of rejection), her bratty same-age aunt Enna skips in and demands a kiss, and Horace is all, "At least one of you actually likes me and isn't afraid of me!" while Elsie just stands there dying of misery. Let's be honest: if this book had been available to me when I was Elsie's age (and if I hadn't grown up with a later generation of Elsie-disdainers writing children's fiction), I would have read it over and over again. It's a sugar-frosted banquet of cruelty.
One of Emma Dunning Banks' shorter recitations sums up the Elsie experience nicely:
What I Plan to Read Next
Amid tidal pools and title drops, the days of Phillip Maddison upon the earth are trickling toward their end. The Gale of the World is the LAST EVER book in the Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight sequence and the book I am about to read next. Will Phil finally begin his Great Work? Will he find the courage to write down all the thoughts that have been howling lyrically through his soul for the past 5800 pages? Will he create an infintely intensifying vortex of ever-more-thinly fictionalized autobiography that DESTROYS CIVILIZATION? Find out next week right here on What the Hell Am I Reading Wednesday!
(but if the last line of The Gale of the World is the first line of The Dark Lantern, there will be no more Reading Wednesdays because I will DIE).
Every time I think the Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight has finally mercifully abandoned the politics angle and settled down to a nice relaxing round of farming and moping, Phil throws in another soppy Hitler aside, just so you don't forget whose book you're reading. So about a third of the way through Lucifer Before Sunrise, as the introduction to a sweeping description of literal floods in England, we get "The great spring-tide of human movement that was Adolf Hitler's heart and brain striving to create unity in a fragmentated continent seemed at last to have lapped itself to stillness: the moment when a scarce perceptive tremor passes through the immense sheet of water that is a tidal flow; when silently, almost stealthily, it begins to lapse." That is a reasonably representative example of HW's writing style in general and the sort of tone he wants to take about his totally well-meaning fallen angel Hitler in particular. He might have done all right in the nineteenth century, writing great-man nonsense about Napoleon - at least, present-day readers would be willing to cut him more slack about it. I'm not convinced that he would have felt any more at home back then than he does in 1943 or 1967.
Near the end of the book, Phil's penchant for excessive and inappropriate Hitler quoting is brought in as evidence for his wife Lucy's divorce suit. I laughed, I cried. Mostly I laughed. The divorce is a blessing in disguise because it allows Phil to give up trying to build a functioning farm for his family to inherit and go live in a cottage and try to write an important novel about "the age" and how hard farming is, like he's always wanted.
What I'm Reading Now
The world of books is wide and also includes Lillian Jackson Braun's The Cat Who Had 14 Tales, which is 14 short, light stories about cats solving mysteries by being cats, as well as killing a few people here and there for great cat justice. I never finished the one Lillian Jackson Braun cat mystery I tried to read (several years ago) because I disliked the human POV guy too intensely and couldn't handle all his conversations eventually being about cats. The stories here worked much better for me: either they're told from the POV of a cat or they're short anecdotes about memorable cats, so there's no suffocating feeling of cats and cat jokes being forced into normally cat-free situations in order to provide a cat connection on every page. This collection was published in 1988, but about half the stories in it were first printed in the 1960s, so as well as being light-hearted fun it's also a small catalog of changing attitudes in cat ownership. (There is also a fantastically stupid joke about cat yuppies).
The world of books also includes the ENORMOUS last volume of Joseph Frank's five-volume Dostoevsky biography and Elsie Disnmore - which I've decided to give another try in book form, now that I've been baptized in the cheesy fire of Elise's Girlhood. It's easy to see why this book attracted so much derision and also why it was such a hit with a subset of young readers. Elsie suffers endlessly from being pretty, which she can't help at all, and talented, which means she is always being crushed between the hideous embarrassment of performing and the unbearable shame of not being able to perform. Her father, Horace, is a ridiculously hapless young monster who keeps willfully misunderstanding Elsie and resenting her for it. Everything is incredibly over the top humiliation and despair, and the whole book is a machine designed to crush Elsie's little world over and over. In the scene I just read, Elsie would really like to hug her father, but he just withdrew his arm and picked up the paper! And just as she's standing there, making up her mind to do it anyway (but terrified of rejection), her bratty same-age aunt Enna skips in and demands a kiss, and Horace is all, "At least one of you actually likes me and isn't afraid of me!" while Elsie just stands there dying of misery. Let's be honest: if this book had been available to me when I was Elsie's age (and if I hadn't grown up with a later generation of Elsie-disdainers writing children's fiction), I would have read it over and over again. It's a sugar-frosted banquet of cruelty.
One of Emma Dunning Banks' shorter recitations sums up the Elsie experience nicely:
"Come hither, my madcap darling!" I said to my four-year-old,
"I say, what shall be done to the naughty girl who will not do as she's told?"
So I told her how Casabianca on the burning ship stood brave,
Of the boy who would not disobey, even his life to save.
Then her eyes grew bright as the morning, and they seemed to look me through;
Ah, ha! thought I, you understand the lesson I have in view.
"Now, what do you think of this lad, my love? Tell me all that's in your heart."
"I fink," she said, "he was drefful good, but he wasn't the least bit smart."
What I Plan to Read Next
Amid tidal pools and title drops, the days of Phillip Maddison upon the earth are trickling toward their end. The Gale of the World is the LAST EVER book in the Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight sequence and the book I am about to read next. Will Phil finally begin his Great Work? Will he find the courage to write down all the thoughts that have been howling lyrically through his soul for the past 5800 pages? Will he create an infintely intensifying vortex of ever-more-thinly fictionalized autobiography that DESTROYS CIVILIZATION? Find out next week right here on What the Hell Am I Reading Wednesday!
(but if the last line of The Gale of the World is the first line of The Dark Lantern, there will be no more Reading Wednesdays because I will DIE).
