Wednesday Weekly Roundup

[evelyn_b]

What I've Just Finished Reading

I had no intention of reading Persuasion this week, but it happened anyway; I picked it up at the coffeeshop's lending library and couldn't put it down for anything. I know it's not a ground-breaking discovery to announce that Jane Austen is a genius, but jeez. I'd forgotten (or maybe never realized in the first

Comments

[lost_spook]

Well, sometimes enthusiasm works far better than all the most beautiful arguments in the world! :-)

The Singing Sands is already so good! Making up stories about a dead man's face saves Inspector Grant from panicking while he's trapped in an enclosed car! I hope the whole book is just Inspector Grant making up romantic stories about dead people and turning out to be right for no good reason.

I think you're enjoying Grant's foibles too much! You're not already wearing brown contacts, are you??

Oh, and I meant to say, I hope you do get something out of Father Brown. I know Chesterton is out of favour, and not without reason - he was an Edwardian Catholic and he has a sort of Merrie England as an ideal in his mind - but his poetry and humour and celebration of the small and mundane as beautiful and fantastical always wins me over regardless.

(It's things like this really: "Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a coloured pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling." and "I believe in getting into hot water. I think it keeps you clean." and "If a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing badly." and "Fairy tales are more than true, not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be fought." and "Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long, and the age of epics is past.") The Father Brown stories from my now-vague memories, can be very poetic, very weird and dark, or very light and humane, or all three, but I think definitely worth trying. I like some of his poems, too. (The Devil is a Gentleman, and The Great Minimum, and A Ballade of Suicide). But I have far too much tolerance for old things!!

[evelyn_b]

Old doesn't worry me, and neither does "politics and religion that are probably the opposite of mine in every way." I'm moderately optimistic about liking Chesterton in story form -- for one thing, there is detection! Amateur detection, my favorite kind! You really have to get up early in the day if you're going to spoil that good beginning (not that it hasn't been done) and for another, the main form I have encountered him is in the form of glibly "iconoclastic" conservo-quipping about how misguided women are for trying to go into politics, and things like that, so I'm assuming I've seen most of the worst of him and very little of the best. No one is well served by being the poster boy for the traditionalist Catholic branch of the American libertarian movement. I'm sure there will be plenty for me to like!

[lost_spook]

the main form I have encountered him is in the form of glibly "iconoclastic" conservo-quipping about how misguided women are for trying to go into politics, and things like that

Ack, well, I would probably dislike him if I'd met him that way, but fortunately I've only ever found him via things I was reading that I liked!

[evelyn_b]

(p.s. my right to brown contacts is the next big fight in the conflict between security and civil liberties! It won't be an easy fight, but I believe it is an important one!)

[lost_spook]

♥ ♥ ♥

[hafl]

"Traditionalist Catholic" "American libertarian movement"

Those two things aren't mutually compatible! What are they thinking?

[evelyn_b]

Never underestimate the ability of American libertarians to reconcile their libertarianism with whatever patently non-liberty-promoting thing they like best. I have seen it all. Though it mostly isn't "reconciling" so much as "cramming inelegantly into the same mental space, then writing a really long and handwavy blog post about how the things are actually totally the same!!"