Just A Normal Wednesday
Apr. 10th, 2019 02:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evelyn_bWhat I've Finished Reading
Last week I forgot to mention An Error of Judgment by Pamela Hansford Johnson, the last 99 Novels selection for 1962. Johnson is, as the About the Author on the back page informs me, the wife of my perfectly acceptable non-nemesis, C.P. Snow - and An Error of Judgment is constructed a lot like one of Snow's lawyer-memoirs: doggedly sensible literate narrator, loosely interwoven personal and professional concerns with a fateful choice at the center, plenty of earnest conversations and monologues. But it's significantly weirder, a little more lively, and a lot more memorable than anything in the Snowverse. I don't know if ultimately the plot "works" - there's something a little artificial about the way the doctor manuvers himself into the set-piece of his crime - but it was certainly a ride and I was glad to take it.
Just A Normal Marriage is the Harlequin novel by Leigh Michaels that I got out of the free books box down the street. I enjoyed 90% of it even though the business of getting Shauna and Rob into a marriage of convenience was pretty strained. The plot: her narcissistic socialite mother is happy to give wealthy Shauna custody of her young half-sister, but only if Shauna is married! Rob is a friendly pediatrician who is concerned about the half-sister's future. Shauna offers to pay his student loans - if he marries her for a year! I also didn't see the point of making Shauna a twenty-six-year-old virgin, or of half the misunderstandings, and Rob's reaction when he thinks Shauna has fallen into the arms of her toolish ex-fiance (when it's actually attempted rape! Rob, what good are you if you can't just ask what happened?) is unworthy of an otherwise good dude. But all of that is no harm done (andthisbluespirit, I will be sure to add the summary to Unconventional Courtship so it can be livened up with Dalek Sec and others).
There is also Faust, technically a play, by my best new genius friend J.W. Goethe. Faust is nuts. It's magnificently nuts. It starts with a heartbreaking prologue about finishing a book at eighty that you started in youth (which is what happened with Faust) and rolls right into a hilarious second prologue that is a lively discussion among a director, a clown, and an actor about what should go into a play. Then it's time for a board meeting in heaven between God and the Devil about whether the devil can go ahead and try tempting that one guy (God says go ahead because otherwise there wouldn't be a story). Then there's an Easter party in the streets of Universitytowne and the Devil sneaks into Faust's house in the shape of a poodle, and it's all downhill, and uphill, and downhill and back up again from there. The translator's note keeps comparing it to Ulysses, so I spent the whole thing thinking about how apt a comparison that is: it's an obsessively sprawling, wry, wacky, incorrigible human circus. Unlike Ulysses, it is almost entirely written in rhyme.
(It's "technically" a play because it's written as one, but I am skeptical about its stageability, though I guess stranger things have happened).
Before I read Faust, the only thing I knew about Faust (Goethe version) was that in the end, Mephisto loses track of Faust's soul because he's too busy lusting after a pack of boyish angels to drag it to hell properly. I am happy to report that I was not misled, and this is in fact what happens.
What I'm Reading Now
Advertisements for Myself by Norman Mailer - which hasn't aged that well and most of whose component pieces aren't that great (Mailer keeps saying things like "As you can see if you're not an idiot, this essay I wrote/freshman creative writing story/dumb joke for a friend is pure garbage and you're a sucker if you thought it was any good, but it would be criminally dishonest of me not to include it in this Advertisement for Myself since I did write it after all" and then you read it and wish you were reading a less genre-breaking iconoclastic hammerpiece where selection is made on more traditional grounds) but which I still kind of like because I can't help liking Mailer. There's this one piece that's just Mailer handing out bitchy backhanded compliments to every author of roughly his own age whom anyone ever compared him to, and my heart just goes out to him - just flaps clumsily out to him like a scruffy maternal goose. And this going-out of my heart, with attendant feeling that Mailer and I are brittle, self-protecting sisters under the skin, is its own back-handed compliment, all the sadder for being directed sixty years after the fact at someone who will never read it. Clearly one of us is rubber, and one of us is glue.
Also, Frankensten! It's great. Victor Frankenstein is an idiot. It's also much more of a Romantic travelogue than I expected. More on this next week.
. . . is the latest large book I am reading along withosprey_archer. At the beginning of the book, Kristin is seven years old and life is good in the fourteenth century, thought slightly more full of peril than you might like - for example, if you go into the mountains, sometimes there are elves, and you can't trust elves (also called dwarves) because they are not Christians. Kristin is a Christian and so are her parents -- her dad Lavran whom she loves a lot and her mother whom she wishes she could love a little more. Kristin's mother is sad because of Kristin's three dead baby brothers and because she can't be the Fun Parent and take Kristin on exciting trips the way Lavran can, but those are the breaks in the fourteenth century, and most of human history to be honest. Now Kristin is a little older and has a baby sister. For a little while, life was good - the mother was happier with a living baby, and Kristin was happy to have a sister - but then there was a terrible accident with an ox and a pile of logs, and little Ulvhild was crushed. She's still alive, but her back might be broken, and no one can tell for sure because it's the fourteenth century. The priest can't help so they've sent for the witch. The witch looks like she might be able to help, but can she? It's all up in the air.
I'm not sure what I think of it so far, but Kristin is promising God to give all her toys to Ulvhild if he'll just make her ok again, and even though prospects aren't great in the fourteenth century, I hope author Sigrid Undset takes her up on it. And I hope Kristin will make friends with the witch and maybe even become her apprentice, as the end of Chapter 3 seems to promise.
What I Plan to Read Next
One night when I was drunkenly describing the plot of Faust to some guys, one of them said that Thomas Mann, author of The Magic Mountain, had also written a Faust. So maybe I'll read that? There are also a couple of 99 Novels from the library, The Spire by William Golding and Late Call by Angus Wilson.
Last week I forgot to mention An Error of Judgment by Pamela Hansford Johnson, the last 99 Novels selection for 1962. Johnson is, as the About the Author on the back page informs me, the wife of my perfectly acceptable non-nemesis, C.P. Snow - and An Error of Judgment is constructed a lot like one of Snow's lawyer-memoirs: doggedly sensible literate narrator, loosely interwoven personal and professional concerns with a fateful choice at the center, plenty of earnest conversations and monologues. But it's significantly weirder, a little more lively, and a lot more memorable than anything in the Snowverse. I don't know if ultimately the plot "works" - there's something a little artificial about the way the doctor manuvers himself into the set-piece of his crime - but it was certainly a ride and I was glad to take it.
Just A Normal Marriage is the Harlequin novel by Leigh Michaels that I got out of the free books box down the street. I enjoyed 90% of it even though the business of getting Shauna and Rob into a marriage of convenience was pretty strained. The plot: her narcissistic socialite mother is happy to give wealthy Shauna custody of her young half-sister, but only if Shauna is married! Rob is a friendly pediatrician who is concerned about the half-sister's future. Shauna offers to pay his student loans - if he marries her for a year! I also didn't see the point of making Shauna a twenty-six-year-old virgin, or of half the misunderstandings, and Rob's reaction when he thinks Shauna has fallen into the arms of her toolish ex-fiance (when it's actually attempted rape! Rob, what good are you if you can't just ask what happened?) is unworthy of an otherwise good dude. But all of that is no harm done (and
thisbluespirit, I will be sure to add the summary to Unconventional Courtship so it can be livened up with Dalek Sec and others). There is also Faust, technically a play, by my best new genius friend J.W. Goethe. Faust is nuts. It's magnificently nuts. It starts with a heartbreaking prologue about finishing a book at eighty that you started in youth (which is what happened with Faust) and rolls right into a hilarious second prologue that is a lively discussion among a director, a clown, and an actor about what should go into a play. Then it's time for a board meeting in heaven between God and the Devil about whether the devil can go ahead and try tempting that one guy (God says go ahead because otherwise there wouldn't be a story). Then there's an Easter party in the streets of Universitytowne and the Devil sneaks into Faust's house in the shape of a poodle, and it's all downhill, and uphill, and downhill and back up again from there. The translator's note keeps comparing it to Ulysses, so I spent the whole thing thinking about how apt a comparison that is: it's an obsessively sprawling, wry, wacky, incorrigible human circus. Unlike Ulysses, it is almost entirely written in rhyme.
(It's "technically" a play because it's written as one, but I am skeptical about its stageability, though I guess stranger things have happened).
Before I read Faust, the only thing I knew about Faust (Goethe version) was that in the end, Mephisto loses track of Faust's soul because he's too busy lusting after a pack of boyish angels to drag it to hell properly. I am happy to report that I was not misled, and this is in fact what happens.
What I'm Reading Now
Advertisements for Myself by Norman Mailer - which hasn't aged that well and most of whose component pieces aren't that great (Mailer keeps saying things like "As you can see if you're not an idiot, this essay I wrote/freshman creative writing story/dumb joke for a friend is pure garbage and you're a sucker if you thought it was any good, but it would be criminally dishonest of me not to include it in this Advertisement for Myself since I did write it after all" and then you read it and wish you were reading a less genre-breaking iconoclastic hammerpiece where selection is made on more traditional grounds) but which I still kind of like because I can't help liking Mailer. There's this one piece that's just Mailer handing out bitchy backhanded compliments to every author of roughly his own age whom anyone ever compared him to, and my heart just goes out to him - just flaps clumsily out to him like a scruffy maternal goose. And this going-out of my heart, with attendant feeling that Mailer and I are brittle, self-protecting sisters under the skin, is its own back-handed compliment, all the sadder for being directed sixty years after the fact at someone who will never read it. Clearly one of us is rubber, and one of us is glue.
Also, Frankensten! It's great. Victor Frankenstein is an idiot. It's also much more of a Romantic travelogue than I expected. More on this next week.
. . . is the latest large book I am reading along with
osprey_archer. At the beginning of the book, Kristin is seven years old and life is good in the fourteenth century, thought slightly more full of peril than you might like - for example, if you go into the mountains, sometimes there are elves, and you can't trust elves (also called dwarves) because they are not Christians. Kristin is a Christian and so are her parents -- her dad Lavran whom she loves a lot and her mother whom she wishes she could love a little more. Kristin's mother is sad because of Kristin's three dead baby brothers and because she can't be the Fun Parent and take Kristin on exciting trips the way Lavran can, but those are the breaks in the fourteenth century, and most of human history to be honest. Now Kristin is a little older and has a baby sister. For a little while, life was good - the mother was happier with a living baby, and Kristin was happy to have a sister - but then there was a terrible accident with an ox and a pile of logs, and little Ulvhild was crushed. She's still alive, but her back might be broken, and no one can tell for sure because it's the fourteenth century. The priest can't help so they've sent for the witch. The witch looks like she might be able to help, but can she? It's all up in the air. I'm not sure what I think of it so far, but Kristin is promising God to give all her toys to Ulvhild if he'll just make her ok again, and even though prospects aren't great in the fourteenth century, I hope author Sigrid Undset takes her up on it. And I hope Kristin will make friends with the witch and maybe even become her apprentice, as the end of Chapter 3 seems to promise.
What I Plan to Read Next
One night when I was drunkenly describing the plot of Faust to some guys, one of them said that Thomas Mann, author of The Magic Mountain, had also written a Faust. So maybe I'll read that? There are also a couple of 99 Novels from the library, The Spire by William Golding and Late Call by Angus Wilson.
no subject
Date: 2019-04-10 07:49 pm (UTC)It's amazing how often this kind of clause is a thing in romance novels. Or actually, probably not amazing.
Johnson is, as the About the Author on the back page informs me, the wife of my perfectly acceptable non-nemesis, C.P. Snow
LOL.
I am glad Goethe is not disappointing you!
no subject
Date: 2019-04-10 11:31 pm (UTC)Goethe could never disappoint me! Maybe at some point in his long life he will write something I don't love, but whatever that is is just a drop in the giant bucket of delight he's brought me. Look at this picture! Don't worry, Goethe! <3
no subject
Date: 2019-04-11 08:16 am (UTC)Aww!
no subject
Date: 2019-04-11 01:00 am (UTC)also
NM reviews Waiting for Godot based on reviews, and then sees it for himself and engages in a spirited dialogue with himself.
also
the cover of the first edition: no goddamn publisher was going to tell him to take off his hat
(Once again, so thankful that you inspired me to read more NM.)
no subject
Date: 2019-04-11 06:09 pm (UTC)I wish my edition hadn't fallen apart as soon as I opened it (cheapo Signet paperback), because it has a great cover with one of those circus-poster pointy hands.
I love the Godot self-dialogue. And the fact that he adds a footnote to his Writer Roundup noting that actually there are several women writing interesting books, only he didn't want to spoil the unity of his sweeping dismissal.
I'm glad that my 99 Novels journey is going to end as it began, with Mailer. <3
no subject
Date: 2019-04-11 01:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-04-11 06:16 pm (UTC)We'll see! The text is highly complimentary to the witch! So much so that I think Ulvhild might have a chance?
Is Juniper a book about Brother Juniper, the famously simple companion of St. Francis of Assisi?
no subject
Date: 2019-04-12 02:05 am (UTC)Juniper is a children's novel by Monica Furlong about a girl in medievalish(?) times being trained as a witch. It's been ages since I read it but I really liked it as a kid.
no subject
Date: 2019-04-12 02:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-04-11 09:36 am (UTC)I despair that Goethe's Faust is that awesome since I recently gave my copy away, having been impatient with bits of it and thus mostly skimming. Oh well. The consequences of being (as I then was) an overworked adjunct professor teaching on three different campus and being tired and impatient. I was always Team Marlowe.
no subject
Date: 2019-04-11 05:54 pm (UTC)(the monster crying his unprepossessing giant milky eyes out over Young Werther, though, is my favorite forever)
Marlowe's Faust was the first Faust I encountered (through the medium of a magically pretentious and XXtra Deep Gothic undergraduate production with plenty of sad homoeroticism) and I put off reading Goethe's for a long time because it sounded too silly and baggy. It's probably about the right time for me to read Marlowe again.
Three different campuses! D: I hope you're less overworked these days.
no subject
Date: 2019-04-11 12:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-04-11 06:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-04-11 02:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-04-11 05:37 pm (UTC)