Wednesday Reading Meme
What I’ve Just Finished Reading
Olivia Laing’s The Trip to Echo Springs: On Writers and Alcohol, which I wrote about before. My remarks on it remain pretty much the same, except to note that Raymond Chandler did in fact appear in the last couple of chapters, just in time to prove that he was an enormous fucking jackass. He wrote - and this was after he had stopped drinking, five years after - that his children had ruined his life, eaten him alive, and he didn’t just write it, but had it published. In public. Where his children could read it.
His children loathed him (and by the time he wrote this, they were adults) so hopefully they never read anything he wrote, but who does that? Discuss it with your therapist, Raymond. Talk about it at your AA meeting. Don’t tell the whole world you wish your children had never been born.
On a happier note, I also finished When Betsy Was a Junior, which I enjoyed thoroughly.
What I’m Reading Now
I’ve just started Eva Ibbotson’s Madensky Square, and you guys, this book is so charming. It’s about a dressmaker who lives on Madensky Square in Vienna on the eve of World War I; not just any dressmaker, but an inspired dressmaker, an artist.
“Dresses come to you like songs come to Schubert, Frau Susanna,” a customer said to me once and I was so pleased, idiot that I was, that I undercharged her quite badly for the evening cape I was fitting.
It’s in first person, the only one of Ibbotson’s books that I’ve read that is in first person - possibly the only one that is in first person, as I’ve read all of her adult books except The Reluctant Heiress. (Can that really be the only one left?) It’s high in the running for my favorite, in between Susanna’s voice, and the portrait of Vienna, and the artistic seriousness with which Susanna approaches the dresses she makes.
I’m also almost done with Mrs. Oliphant’s The Perpetual Curate, which I am not enjoying quite as much as I did Miss Marjoribanks. The book seems weirdly baggy - much longer than it needs to be, very circuitous - and it doesn’t have a character like Miss Marjoribanks with whom I am happy to spend hundreds of pages even if nothing in particular ever happens.
Having said that, it’s not like reading it is a chore. But I do feel that she could have done much better work if she hadn’t been constrained by necessity to write so fast for money.
What I Plan to Read Next
Once I’ve finished The Perpetual Curate, I’m thinking about reading Louisa May Alcott’s Moods, or perhaps Hospital Sketches. (The reason that the one is connected to the other is that they’re both on my Kindle. I try to read just one book at a time on there.) Hospital Sketches should probably take priority: I have an idea for a romance novella with a heroine who was a Civil War nurse (though the novella takes place after the war), so a little research would be useful.
And of course Betsy and Joe, the tale of Betsy’s senior year of high school.
ETA: Apparently I meant Raymond Carver and not Raymond Chandler. Sorry for blackening your name unduly, Chandler.
Olivia Laing’s The Trip to Echo Springs: On Writers and Alcohol, which I wrote about before. My remarks on it remain pretty much the same, except to note that Raymond Chandler did in fact appear in the last couple of chapters, just in time to prove that he was an enormous fucking jackass. He wrote - and this was after he had stopped drinking, five years after - that his children had ruined his life, eaten him alive, and he didn’t just write it, but had it published. In public. Where his children could read it.
His children loathed him (and by the time he wrote this, they were adults) so hopefully they never read anything he wrote, but who does that? Discuss it with your therapist, Raymond. Talk about it at your AA meeting. Don’t tell the whole world you wish your children had never been born.
On a happier note, I also finished When Betsy Was a Junior, which I enjoyed thoroughly.
What I’m Reading Now
I’ve just started Eva Ibbotson’s Madensky Square, and you guys, this book is so charming. It’s about a dressmaker who lives on Madensky Square in Vienna on the eve of World War I; not just any dressmaker, but an inspired dressmaker, an artist.
“Dresses come to you like songs come to Schubert, Frau Susanna,” a customer said to me once and I was so pleased, idiot that I was, that I undercharged her quite badly for the evening cape I was fitting.
It’s in first person, the only one of Ibbotson’s books that I’ve read that is in first person - possibly the only one that is in first person, as I’ve read all of her adult books except The Reluctant Heiress. (Can that really be the only one left?) It’s high in the running for my favorite, in between Susanna’s voice, and the portrait of Vienna, and the artistic seriousness with which Susanna approaches the dresses she makes.
I’m also almost done with Mrs. Oliphant’s The Perpetual Curate, which I am not enjoying quite as much as I did Miss Marjoribanks. The book seems weirdly baggy - much longer than it needs to be, very circuitous - and it doesn’t have a character like Miss Marjoribanks with whom I am happy to spend hundreds of pages even if nothing in particular ever happens.
Having said that, it’s not like reading it is a chore. But I do feel that she could have done much better work if she hadn’t been constrained by necessity to write so fast for money.
What I Plan to Read Next
Once I’ve finished The Perpetual Curate, I’m thinking about reading Louisa May Alcott’s Moods, or perhaps Hospital Sketches. (The reason that the one is connected to the other is that they’re both on my Kindle. I try to read just one book at a time on there.) Hospital Sketches should probably take priority: I have an idea for a romance novella with a heroine who was a Civil War nurse (though the novella takes place after the war), so a little research would be useful.
And of course Betsy and Joe, the tale of Betsy’s senior year of high school.
ETA: Apparently I meant Raymond Carver and not Raymond Chandler. Sorry for blackening your name unduly, Chandler.