What was I reading recentlyish that talked about the Dark Ages being defined by the lack of Homer and Ovid? Was it The Secret History? Or The Fall of Rome maybe? Probably it was Tom Stoppard, Arcadia or The Invention of Love. It sounds like the kind of thing Tom Stoppard would say. Anyway, whatever character it was, they said something about how the Dark Ages were Dark because we didn’t have the classics around, in all their universal brilliance, to explain us to ourselves. When the West got them back again (thanks, Arabia!), it was like being reborn, a…
35 CommentsReading the End Posts
I have a gorgeous copy of Doctor Zhivago and I have previously enjoyed the book (by comparison with other Russian novels) and I have seen not one but two film adaptations of the book and thus know who the characters are. This should be a recipe for extreme, resounding Russian-novel-reading success. Instead of that, I had a middling amount of success. There are a lot of characters in Doctor Zhivago, and they all – you may have noticed – have different names. Several names. Full names, partial names, and nicknames. Eva, who knows about Russian things because she has been…
31 CommentsColonial encounters fascinate me. Sometimes I think that I will abandon all my other reading and devote myself only to colonial fiction and nonfiction. In general, I like colonial encounters by colonizing country in this exact order from best to worst: British, French, Portuguese, Belgian, Italian, German, Spanish, American. I have a particular sneaky fondness for novels from the olden days where stalwart British protagonists go abroad and have stiff upper lips and unyielding codes of hono(u)r. Please don’t judge me. Three Empires on the Nile had a lot of players and a lot of new words and terms for…
20 CommentsI am a fan of delayed gratification. You may not know this about me because, for instance, I whined so much about not having Monsters of Men handed to me the identical second that I finished reading The Ask and the Answer. You may suppose that a girl who reads the end of books before she reads the middle, and interrupts cross-stitching a Christmas stocking for her little cousin to find out from Television Without Pity what is going to happen in the last twenty minutes of the episode of The Good Wife she is watching, is not a girl…
37 CommentsNope, not talking about the Senator from Minnesota (that’s weird, right? The lines between entertainment and politics are weirdly thin these days. Was it always thus?). I am talking about the books I have been reading lately, which have been full of people who lack integrity. Now I am ready to read about Betsy and Tacy, whose biggest deceptions involved reading Lady Audley’s Secret on the sly (I just wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover. That would be legitimately inappropriate for a twelve-year-old). The Sealed Letter, Emma Donohue After I read Room (yeah, yeah, I read it), I thought it might be…
31 CommentsI’ve said before that I like the kind of novel where you have two sets of characters in two different time periods, and the novel goes back and forth between them. Especially when one of the sets of characters (the modern one) is researching the other set (the old-time-y one.) So when I saw that Jennifer Donnelly, beloved of the blogosphere (that is you) for her Rose books and then Northern Lights, had written a book of this sort, I was…well, I was mildly intrigued. I thought I might get it from the library sometime if I remembered to. Then…
42 CommentsNB: I am not really back. If I were back I would be reading your posts and posting comments that are witty and insightful as my comments always are (RIGHT?), and I really miss reading y’all’s posts because I love y’all. However, I am still doing The Transition, and also while The Transition is going on, my laptop is being repaired, and sadly there is some sort of general delay on parts, so it is taking ages for my laptop to become healed, so I am borrowing my aunt’s computer and I feel guilty using it for hours like I…
35 CommentsI got a job! A really cool job that is exactly what I wanted! A job whose interview passed in such a way that upon getting the job, I had to sit down and think about all the life decisions I’ve made (learn Latin, go to college in Louisiana so as not to have debt, not go to grad school for library science), and gloat about what good decisions they all were. It’s very validating. I love it when people say “Jenny, you were right,” and it’s even that much better when it’s the universe saying “Jenny, you were right,”…
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