Wednesday Reading Meme
Jan. 25th, 2023 08:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Elizabeth Keating’s The Essential Questions: Interview Your Family to Uncover Stories and Bridge Generations is an unusual book in that it is, in fact, more or less a compendium of questions, plus advice for how to conduct these interviews so they’re productive and interesting, and examples of interesting that Keating’s students have learned in interviewing their own family members: often they discover that their grandparents or parents are far more multifaceted than they had realized.
I’d like to interview my parents for general family history reasons, but also because I think I could get some great background information about life in the US in the middle of the twentieth century. (I wish I could interview my grandparents, who grew up in the 1920s and 30s, but alas they are all long dead.) Contemplating whether to get a dedicated recorder, or would using my phone and/or computer work? Does anyone have recommendations for audio recording apps?
Also Rutherford Montgomery’s Kildee House, which was a delight! When retired stonemason Jerome Kildee builds a cottage at the foot of a redwood tree, he intends to be a lazy hermit. Instead he finds himself wrangling a hoard of raccoons and spotted skunks (a lot of this book is simply raccoon and skunk shenanigans and I am HERE for it), not to mention spitfire neighbor girl Emma Lou Eppy and her nemesis, Donald Cabot!
And finally Shelby Van Pelt’s Remarkably Bright Creatures, which I checked out on the lure of octopus POV. The octopus POV is indeed great (Marcellus the octopus sounds kind of Murderbot), but the book would have been better off for the humans figuring out the solution to their mystery much earlier on, because I certainly figured out who was related to whom three hundred pages before they did and it was tiresome waiting for them to catch up.
What I’m Reading Now
In D. K. Broster’s The Yellow Poppy, the Comte de Brencourt has just informed the Duchesse Valentine (for whom the Comte has long nursed an infatuation) that her husband is dead! BUT IN FACT, the duc is still alive, a fact known only too well to the priest in disguise from whom the duchesse has just requested a funeral mass… only the priest swore to the duc that he would not reveal the duc’s true identity to anyone! Will he break his promise to the duc, or perform the sacrilege of a funeral mass for a man that he knows to be living?
I think surely he’ll find a third alternative, as undoubtedly Broster wants to bring the duc and duchesse face to face when they each believe the other dead, for MAXIMUM DRAMA.
Also onward in David Copperfield! Young David is on the road to becoming a lawyer of family and nautical law (oddly housed in the same obscure court). He has also just gotten wildly, uproariously drunk for the first time in his life, then unfortunately ran into Agnes, the girl he’s definitely NOT in love with, he loves her as a SISTER, OKAY? It is his sheer brotherly regard for her that fills her with jealous rage when he learns that slimy, unctuous Uriah Heep aspires to win her hand!
What I Plan to Read Next
The 2023 Newbery Award winners will be announced January 30th! So excited.
Elizabeth Keating’s The Essential Questions: Interview Your Family to Uncover Stories and Bridge Generations is an unusual book in that it is, in fact, more or less a compendium of questions, plus advice for how to conduct these interviews so they’re productive and interesting, and examples of interesting that Keating’s students have learned in interviewing their own family members: often they discover that their grandparents or parents are far more multifaceted than they had realized.
I’d like to interview my parents for general family history reasons, but also because I think I could get some great background information about life in the US in the middle of the twentieth century. (I wish I could interview my grandparents, who grew up in the 1920s and 30s, but alas they are all long dead.) Contemplating whether to get a dedicated recorder, or would using my phone and/or computer work? Does anyone have recommendations for audio recording apps?
Also Rutherford Montgomery’s Kildee House, which was a delight! When retired stonemason Jerome Kildee builds a cottage at the foot of a redwood tree, he intends to be a lazy hermit. Instead he finds himself wrangling a hoard of raccoons and spotted skunks (a lot of this book is simply raccoon and skunk shenanigans and I am HERE for it), not to mention spitfire neighbor girl Emma Lou Eppy and her nemesis, Donald Cabot!
And finally Shelby Van Pelt’s Remarkably Bright Creatures, which I checked out on the lure of octopus POV. The octopus POV is indeed great (Marcellus the octopus sounds kind of Murderbot), but the book would have been better off for the humans figuring out the solution to their mystery much earlier on, because I certainly figured out who was related to whom three hundred pages before they did and it was tiresome waiting for them to catch up.
What I’m Reading Now
In D. K. Broster’s The Yellow Poppy, the Comte de Brencourt has just informed the Duchesse Valentine (for whom the Comte has long nursed an infatuation) that her husband is dead! BUT IN FACT, the duc is still alive, a fact known only too well to the priest in disguise from whom the duchesse has just requested a funeral mass… only the priest swore to the duc that he would not reveal the duc’s true identity to anyone! Will he break his promise to the duc, or perform the sacrilege of a funeral mass for a man that he knows to be living?
I think surely he’ll find a third alternative, as undoubtedly Broster wants to bring the duc and duchesse face to face when they each believe the other dead, for MAXIMUM DRAMA.
Also onward in David Copperfield! Young David is on the road to becoming a lawyer of family and nautical law (oddly housed in the same obscure court). He has also just gotten wildly, uproariously drunk for the first time in his life, then unfortunately ran into Agnes, the girl he’s definitely NOT in love with, he loves her as a SISTER, OKAY? It is his sheer brotherly regard for her that fills her with jealous rage when he learns that slimy, unctuous Uriah Heep aspires to win her hand!
What I Plan to Read Next
The 2023 Newbery Award winners will be announced January 30th! So excited.
no subject
Date: 2023-01-25 01:32 pm (UTC)This was one of my favorite scenes!
no subject
Date: 2023-01-25 01:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-25 02:41 pm (UTC)Re: David Copperfield, the name Uriah Heep is making me flash back to our earlier conversation about those odd Biblical names. I'm wondering how the name "Uriah" sounded to Dickens. Did it sound as reasonable as "David"? I mean as a whole, "Uriah Heep" clearly signals ~ unpleasant ~ and since Dickens is famous for that, it must even at the time have had that effect. But how much was the Uriah part and how much was the Heep part, and how much was all of it together?
And: Animal shenanigans for the win!
no subject
Date: 2023-01-25 03:18 pm (UTC)I don't think I've ever run into another Uriah in Victorian literature, so while Uriah may have sounded slightly less outlandish to ye average Victorian reader than it does to us, (and I bet ye average Victorian would know the exact Biblical reference without having to look it up), I think it must have been meant to sound as unpleasant and unctuous as the man itself... although who knows how much of that is simply that Dickens described him so vividly as to associate the name with him forever!
no subject
Date: 2023-01-25 04:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-25 05:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-28 11:34 pm (UTC)I used a nicer microphone with my laptop, and then used Audacity to record/process, which I thought balanced cost with effort quite well.
no subject
Date: 2023-02-01 01:44 pm (UTC)I am familiar with Audacity from college language classes. That might be a good way to go.