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What Are You Reading Weekend
Aug. 3rd, 2019 07:36 amCurrently Reading:
Fiction: I've just started Outlander (aka 'Cross Stitch', but my e-book is a retitled show-tie-in). So far I'm intrigued, but a little *harrumph* at the fact that Our Heroine is quite deliberately set up as having the skills (gained on-the-job by assisting her uncle) to rival her archaeologist husband, a professor, but at the same time her narration keeps telling you that she's uninterested in history and not very clever. You could do his job *for* him, lady.
I also started Les Trois Mousquetaires, which is still a bit beyond my French capacity, but as both original and the most common translation are out of copyright, I'm tabbing back and forth between two Gutenberg ePubs, hoping to make sense of it.
Lit Mag: Partway into The Lifted Brow 41
Poetry: Being that I have consumed All Of Good Omens and then All Of The Good Omens Fanfic, the logical follow-up is Milton. Being that my attempts to read Paradise lost as words on a page have failed multiple times, I have succumbed to the inevitable and subscribed to Anthony Oliviera's patreon-funded podcast 'The Devil's Party'. So far I am loving it, and although I was initially suspicious of his reading of the first line, turns out it is I who do not know my Virgil (big surprise there).
Academic: Also on the list of 'long delayed inevitables', I started Montaigne's essay 'On Friendship'. In English, although I think I'll have to go read it in French, just to tease out the specific terms he's using.
Other non-fiction: Zip and zilch.
Recently Finished:
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Ann Jacobs
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
As well as being a very important primary source, this text exhibits Jacobs' real flair for storytelling, sensitivity to human character and foibles (without making *excuses* for slaveholders, she shows a keen understanding of the social variables that create differences in behaviour and conduct among them; and her attention to the different priorities and values among both enslaved and free black people is even sharper). Perhaps the only part that truly astonished me was her journey to Britain, which she paints as a land free of racial discrimination: big major LOLS there. I rather doubt she thought so; more likely, her abolitionist agenda was served by accentuating the ways in which Britain was *somewhat less terrible* at the time - especially as she's explicitly addressing white liberals throughout, leaning on their built-in admiration of European tradition would be logical.
I also finished Germano's From PhD To Book, which was equal thirds usefully reassuring, terrifying, and laughably out of date.
Online Fiction
Nell Hanley (Electric Lit), The First Day of What Remained for Tedman Ward, in which a sad man meets a giant on a beach. I was intrigued but didn't love-love this.
Podcast: I resumed listening to 'Unwell', which is still A Good.
Up Next:
Well, I've got Banana Fish and a book on Arthurian romance, in hard copy; and I just bought Roxanne Gay's 'Difficult Women', and AJ Demas' latest (which, unlike their previous, isn't an Amazon exclusive! I do not wish to pay money to Amazon!). We'll see what I end up actually reading, in the next twelve days or so of travel.
Music Notes:
Here is A version of Pachabel's Canon played on baroque instruments. It is Very Good.
Fiction: I've just started Outlander (aka 'Cross Stitch', but my e-book is a retitled show-tie-in). So far I'm intrigued, but a little *harrumph* at the fact that Our Heroine is quite deliberately set up as having the skills (gained on-the-job by assisting her uncle) to rival her archaeologist husband, a professor, but at the same time her narration keeps telling you that she's uninterested in history and not very clever. You could do his job *for* him, lady.
I also started Les Trois Mousquetaires, which is still a bit beyond my French capacity, but as both original and the most common translation are out of copyright, I'm tabbing back and forth between two Gutenberg ePubs, hoping to make sense of it.
Lit Mag: Partway into The Lifted Brow 41
Poetry: Being that I have consumed All Of Good Omens and then All Of The Good Omens Fanfic, the logical follow-up is Milton. Being that my attempts to read Paradise lost as words on a page have failed multiple times, I have succumbed to the inevitable and subscribed to Anthony Oliviera's patreon-funded podcast 'The Devil's Party'. So far I am loving it, and although I was initially suspicious of his reading of the first line, turns out it is I who do not know my Virgil (big surprise there).
Academic: Also on the list of 'long delayed inevitables', I started Montaigne's essay 'On Friendship'. In English, although I think I'll have to go read it in French, just to tease out the specific terms he's using.
Other non-fiction: Zip and zilch.
Recently Finished:
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Ann JacobsMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
As well as being a very important primary source, this text exhibits Jacobs' real flair for storytelling, sensitivity to human character and foibles (without making *excuses* for slaveholders, she shows a keen understanding of the social variables that create differences in behaviour and conduct among them; and her attention to the different priorities and values among both enslaved and free black people is even sharper). Perhaps the only part that truly astonished me was her journey to Britain, which she paints as a land free of racial discrimination: big major LOLS there. I rather doubt she thought so; more likely, her abolitionist agenda was served by accentuating the ways in which Britain was *somewhat less terrible* at the time - especially as she's explicitly addressing white liberals throughout, leaning on their built-in admiration of European tradition would be logical.
I also finished Germano's From PhD To Book, which was equal thirds usefully reassuring, terrifying, and laughably out of date.
Online Fiction
Nell Hanley (Electric Lit), The First Day of What Remained for Tedman Ward, in which a sad man meets a giant on a beach. I was intrigued but didn't love-love this.
Podcast: I resumed listening to 'Unwell', which is still A Good.
Up Next:
Well, I've got Banana Fish and a book on Arthurian romance, in hard copy; and I just bought Roxanne Gay's 'Difficult Women', and AJ Demas' latest (which, unlike their previous, isn't an Amazon exclusive! I do not wish to pay money to Amazon!). We'll see what I end up actually reading, in the next twelve days or so of travel.
Music Notes:
Here is A version of Pachabel's Canon played on baroque instruments. It is Very Good.