Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

A. R. Luria’s The Making of Mind, which is an interesting account of Luria’s various psychological experiments (I found the one comparing the descriptions of geometrical figures given by illiterate peasants and literate townsfolk particularly interesting), but frustrating short on any personal details. And by

Comments

[alby_mangroves]

I'm definitely interested to know what you think of The Martian when you're done!

Mary Lenox’s relationship to food in The Secret Garden - I always thought of her as the sort of person who wasn't interested in food, or only in the case of sustenance, certainly nothing to do with taste, variety, cooking. More like fuel, rather than something to enjoy.

[osprey_archer]

The basic point in the book is that as Mary gets happier, she starts to eat more: all that work in the garden has given her an appetite for the first time in her life.

But I think A Little Princess probably would have been a better Burnett book for food, because food is all over that book. Sara's quest to find good food for Becky, the food at Sara's tragic birthday party, the buns that Sara buys with a fourpence she buys in the street... and of course the two feasts at the end.

[asakiyume]

The buns she buys really loomed large in my imagination. That, and the feast that's brought to her by Ram Das.

[evelyn_b]

That food book sounds like fun, but I don't know if I could handle all the wrongness. Pa Wilder? The eternal present of the revolution? One of the nice things about books is supposed to be that you can go back and check if you don't remember something, like the dates that have been helpfully included in the Table of Contents just for you, or the names of the main characters.

[osprey_archer]

I just can't get over Pa Wilder. Pa Wilder. Laura's maiden name gets mentioned a lot in the books, so it boggles the mind that anyone could forget it.

[lycoris]

Oh, there is nothing that annoys me more than people writing about books and getting details wrong. If you're going to write about the book, why would you not have it in front of you to check? If you don't care about the book, fine, whatever but don't then write about it in a detailed fashion! (my pet hate is when people read the back of a book, assume they know what it's about and describe it hideously wrongly. Arragh!)

Shame though, that book sounds like it could have been really kind of interesting.

[osprey_archer]

It's so frustrating. It's not even like these are nitpicky details, either, which you only pick up if you're paying close attention. They're both all over the book.

[asakiyume]

Wow, those mistakes about Laura Ingalls Wilder are pretty dire, and same with Les Miserables. It sounds as if someone who hasn't really read any of the books was just given a list of the foods and told to write about them. But even that doesn't excuse the Pa Wilder mistake. Honestly!

Looking forward to your review of The Martian.

I'm reading for book group Life after Life, in which the protagonist's life ends at many different points (from right at birth on up). The story starts anew each time she dies, and as she gets older, she has presentments, I guess you could say, about her death in other timelines, and so can take corrective actions, instinctively

[osprey_archer]

Maybe she just hasn't read the books for years? But I feel like if you were going to make a meal/recipe based on a book, you would at very least flip through to read the food-related parts, surely.

The Life after Life book sounds vaguely reminiscent of the Jo Walton book My Real Children, which I found very frustrating. It is an interesting concept, but I'm not sure what kind of execution I actually would find satisfying.

[asakiyume]

Yeah, I've had mixed feelings about Life after Life, but I have to say, it's growing on me.