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Reading the End Posts

The heat is melting my brain

And that is why I posted one of my Diana Wynne Jones posts instead of scheduling it. And that is why it’s presumably showing up in your Google Reader. PAY IT NO MIND. It will post properly in August. I am stupid today. I have been out in the heat all morning and now it is hot in my apartment and I am doing laundry, which is using up more of my attention than you might anticipate. Also, I am very stupid all the time.

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Review: Promises of Love, Mary Renault

Obligatory pre-gushing blurb: Vivian, a nurse in between-the-wars England, meets Mic, a pathologist and the latest in a string of close friends of her flighty, unreliable brother. Though Mic initially seems interested in Vivian because of her resemblance to her brother, they soon become good friends and then lovers. I am experimenting with keeping a reading journal. I have not decided exactly what sort of thing you write down in a reading journal, but one thing it is definitely good for is saving anecdotes and quotations that I like. Then when I am done reading, I can go back and…

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The Purity Myth, Jessica Valenti

This summer has been one long lesson in disagreeing with people I agree with. As a liberal girl growing up in Louisiana, I have been far more accustomed to disagreeing with people I disagree with, but here in this liberal university town, I am surrounded by a whole bunch of people who agree with me. This is really nice in a way, as I can say things about gay rights to someone I hardly know without fearing that I have just inadvertently issued the opening salvo of a debate. But in another way, it is frustrating. When people who disagree…

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Review: Wartime, Britain 1939-1945, Juliet Gardiner

I love the idea of social histories, but they rarely live up to what I expect from them. Until now. Juliet Gardiner is the perfect social historian. Wartime, a social history of Britain during World War II, is massively huge, which is part of the reason it took me so long to read. The other part is that it constantly made me cry, and I had to stop reading it and get Kleenex, because of how finest an hour it was in Britain. Gardiner has an unerring instinct for the perfect quotation from each personal account she quotes, the perfect…

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Review: The Latin Letters of C. S. Lewis, ed. and trans. Martin Moynihan

May I tell you a cute story? It’s very cute, and I can’t proceed with this review until I tell you the cute story, so if you are not in the mood for a sweet story, you should depart precipitously. Once upon a time there was an Italian priest called Don Giovanni Calabria who read C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters and loved it. He wanted to write to C. S. Lewis to express his admiration for the book, but he didn’t speak English, and he suspected (rightly) that C. S. Lewis didn’t speak Italian. Knowing that Lewis was a scholar…

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Fagles’s Odyssey: Stories I know in the second quarter

Books seven through twelve of the Odyssey contain a lot of the stories I remember from my Latin II class: The Cyclops, the cattle of the sun, the Lotus-eaters, Scylla and Charybdis. Odysseus is washed up on the shores of Phaeacia and comes to the court of King Alcinous, who welcomes him warmly (his wife Arete slightly less warmly, as she suspects him of deception) and offers him transport back to Ithaca. As Alcinous offers Odysseus hospitality in his hall, he notices that Odysseus weeps when he hears the bard sing of Troy, and he asks him to tell them…

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Gender bias

You know how sometimes you have really strong reactions to things that you never thought you cared that much about? Like this one time I was reading through course descriptions at various universities to see what their course-books were (I was craving nonfiction, and this is before I discovered book blogs), and I saw this course about the poetry of the Hugheses. As in, Ted and Sylvia. I’m not even that big a fan of Sylvia Plath: I love her poetry but I think she would have been maddening in real life. But I was gripped with this unbelievable visceral…

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Review: Talking About Detective Fiction, P.D. James

Okay, I know you remember that I said no more books I can get at home. I know I know I know. I realize this post means that Diary of a Provincial Lady was not my last exception to the rule. Actually the rule was, I will only read books that I cannot get when I am at home, unless the author gives his or her name as two initials followed by a surname. Please do not be perturbed by my Orwellian alteration of a previously established rule. P.D. James, acclaimed writer of detective fiction, has a number of things…

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More Diana Wynne Jones books

Don’t blame me. She has written a lot of books. The One Where Words Are Mighty Archer’s Goon The world it is set in: Modern England, in a town The premise: When Howard comes home to find a Goon in his kitchen, it is his first inkling that his town is controlled by seven very powerful wizards, all apparently hell-bent on taking over the world. But something is stopping them. They are all, for some reason, deeply interested in the two thousand words that Howard’s father Quentin writes each month, and each swears that she or he is not the…

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Review: Diary of a Provincial Lady, E.M. Delafield

From here on out, I will only be reading books that I cannot get when I am at home, absolutely with no exceptions. Diary of a Provincial Lady was my last exception, and I only read it because I forgot that my mother had ordered it from the internet. And also Fagles’ Odyssey, I’ll carry on reading that, because it’s a nice thing to read just before I go to bed at night. There. This forms an unalterable law by which I will live until the end of the summer. I am glad I read Diary of a Provincial Lady.…

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