Wednesday Reading Meme
Nov. 30th, 2022 08:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Some blessed soul posted the next Worrals books on fadedpage: Worrals of the Islands: A Story of the War in the Pacific! I don’t know who is responsible for the steady uploading of Worrals books, but they are a gentleman and a scholar.
Top notch adventure (involving a SECRET ISLAND BASE and one particularly DARING RESCUE), but one of the more racist Johns books that I’ve read, as tends to happen in Johns’ books set in far flung locations.
Jane Langton’s The Mysterious Circus and The Dragon Tree, the last two books in the Hall Family Chronicles, a series of offbeat novels set in Concord, Massachusetts and liberally bedecked with quotations from Thoreau, plus occasional references to Emerson and Alcott (Louisa, not Bronson). Enjoyable, but didn’t reach the heights of some of the earlier books in the sequence. Still, I’m glad that I’ve finally read the whole series!
I also finished Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, which is one part hawking memoir about Macdonald’s hawk Mabel, one part nonfiction book about T. H. White, The Loneliest Man in the World, and yet another part memoir about Macdonald’s grief for her father, which was harrowing enough that I took some time to make it through the audiobook. Macdonald reads it herself; I loved the hawking and the landscape descriptions.
What I’m Reading Now
New developments in The Lightning Conductor! Shockingly, Molly’s wonderful new car is in fact a horrible car that breaks down at the slightest provocation, but FORTUNATELY, she has acquired a new chauffeur who is in fact a Gentleman in Disguise, who had taken on the position because Molly is so fetching. Clearly THIS is the love interest and perhaps at some point he will pop the Gorgeous Man in the nose for selling Molly such a wreck of a car.
Meanwhile, no news of Ishmael from Whale Weekly. Apparently the name is not quite accurate: “the pace will vary - some weeks you’ll get multiple emails and others you’ll get none.”
What I Plan to Read Next
littlerhymes is a bad influence and clued me in to the existence of a Christmas Carol readalong, which will deliver Christmas Carol snippets to the comfort of your inbox - a mere two pages a day, every day from December 1-26! A literary advent calendar! HOW COULD I REFUSE.
Some blessed soul posted the next Worrals books on fadedpage: Worrals of the Islands: A Story of the War in the Pacific! I don’t know who is responsible for the steady uploading of Worrals books, but they are a gentleman and a scholar.
Top notch adventure (involving a SECRET ISLAND BASE and one particularly DARING RESCUE), but one of the more racist Johns books that I’ve read, as tends to happen in Johns’ books set in far flung locations.
Jane Langton’s The Mysterious Circus and The Dragon Tree, the last two books in the Hall Family Chronicles, a series of offbeat novels set in Concord, Massachusetts and liberally bedecked with quotations from Thoreau, plus occasional references to Emerson and Alcott (Louisa, not Bronson). Enjoyable, but didn’t reach the heights of some of the earlier books in the sequence. Still, I’m glad that I’ve finally read the whole series!
I also finished Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, which is one part hawking memoir about Macdonald’s hawk Mabel, one part nonfiction book about T. H. White, The Loneliest Man in the World, and yet another part memoir about Macdonald’s grief for her father, which was harrowing enough that I took some time to make it through the audiobook. Macdonald reads it herself; I loved the hawking and the landscape descriptions.
What I’m Reading Now
New developments in The Lightning Conductor! Shockingly, Molly’s wonderful new car is in fact a horrible car that breaks down at the slightest provocation, but FORTUNATELY, she has acquired a new chauffeur who is in fact a Gentleman in Disguise, who had taken on the position because Molly is so fetching. Clearly THIS is the love interest and perhaps at some point he will pop the Gorgeous Man in the nose for selling Molly such a wreck of a car.
Meanwhile, no news of Ishmael from Whale Weekly. Apparently the name is not quite accurate: “the pace will vary - some weeks you’ll get multiple emails and others you’ll get none.”
What I Plan to Read Next
littlerhymes is a bad influence and clued me in to the existence of a Christmas Carol readalong, which will deliver Christmas Carol snippets to the comfort of your inbox - a mere two pages a day, every day from December 1-26! A literary advent calendar! HOW COULD I REFUSE.
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Date: 2022-11-30 02:11 pm (UTC)And I have the Worrals on my kindle ready for me to get round to it. I am familiar with WEJ's takes on the Rest Of The World, so I shall be braced for that, and enjoy the fun bits.
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Date: 2022-11-30 05:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-30 02:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-30 05:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-30 06:21 pm (UTC)I had a feeling that would be the case. Well, I will skim as hard as I can.
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Date: 2022-11-30 07:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-30 06:48 pm (UTC)I signed up for the Christmas Carol readalong, too. I've never actually read it! Not in full, I mean; I read a very very abridged illustrated version when I was a kid, the kind meant more to be decorative than anything. I remember it as a little gem of a book, copiously illustrated and thick but only a few inches square, brought out at Christmas as part of the decorations, but from plot descriptions I'm fairly sure it pared the story down to the bone in service of size and aesthetics.
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Date: 2022-11-30 07:36 pm (UTC)I think I read The Christmas Carol, or at least I know that I tried to read The Christmas Carol. But it was a long time ago, and I can't remember if I actually got all the way through, so clearly it's high time for a reread! And of course I'll have to rewatch Muppet Christmas Carol as a lagniappe.
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Date: 2022-12-01 03:07 am (UTC)Yes, of course, Muppet Christmas Carol! A perfect lagniappe, to be sure. That I have seen, after Becca was appalled some years ago to discover I hadn't. (I didn't grow up on the Muppets, really, so I missed out on that gem till adulthood.) One of the best period films around!
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Date: 2022-12-01 12:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-01 02:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-02 05:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-01 11:42 am (UTC)me right now: 🥰🥰🥰
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Date: 2022-12-01 02:47 pm (UTC)I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade.
I mean, Dickens has a point here. Is there anything particularly dead about a door-nail?
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Date: 2022-12-02 06:45 am (UTC)He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.
Charles is having a LOT of fun and so am I so far.
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Date: 2022-12-02 01:22 pm (UTC)