Wednesday Reading Meme
Mar. 20th, 2024 06:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Carol Ryrie Brink’s Winter Cottage, a wonderful book! Near the beginning of the Great Depression, Minty and Eggs are on the road with their sweet but feckless father when their car breaks down… right next to someone’s charming isolated lakeshore summer cottage. As their current destination is the back bedroom of an aunt who emphatically does not want to put them up, they make only some half-hearted attempts to fix the car before settling into the cottage for the winter. (Conveniently, they arrive with a winter’s worth of provisions, left over from their father’s latest failed business venture: a grocery store.) Exactly as cozy as a book with such a premise should be.
I also read Gerald Durrell’s Catch Me a Colobus, because I realized that the local library has a few of his books I hadn’t read and instantly could not survive another moment with a fresh Gerald Durrell book in my life. This one is a bit of a hodgepodge, I suspect because Durrell wrote it swiftly to get funds to shore up his zoo, which is mostly what the first third of the book is about, as he returned from a collecting trip to find the zoo hovering on the edge of bankruptcy. We continue on a trip to Sierra Leone for his first BBC series (this is the bit that the title comes from, as colobus monkeys are high on his list for the collecting trip), and end with a trip to Mexico to collect the rare Teporingo, a volcano-dwelling rabbit in danger of extinction.
Although hopping from continent to continent like this makes the book a bit formless, Durrell’s prose is a delight as always. I love his metaphors, perfectly apt and entirely unexpected: the “slight squeak” of a Teporingo, “like somebody rubbing a damp thumb over a balloon,” or the experience of walking through a forest of massive bamboo stalks, which “creak and groan musically” in the slightest wind; “It must have sounded like that rounding the Horn in an old sailing ship in high wind.”
What I’m Reading Now
Traipsing along in Women’s Weird. In any anthology, the quality is inevitably a bit uneven, but overall it’s quite high. The scariest story so far is May Sinclair’s “Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched” (a pair of lovers stuck together in Hell for all eternity, even though in life they deeply bored each other); Edith Wharton’s “Kerfol” is a classic spooky ghost story, while my favorite for sheer strength of voice is Edith Nesbit’s “The Shadow.” Oh, props to Margery Lawrence for making a saucepan deeply ominous in “The Haunted Saucepan.” The way it just sits there, boiling, on a cold stove…
I should be hitting D. K. Broster’s story (“Couching at the Door”) next week. Excited to report back!
What I Plan to Read Next
An account of getting distracted by Winter Cottage and Catch Me a Colobus, I have made almost no progress on the books I earnestly desired to make progress on last week. Well, such is the reading life. Sometimes a book comes along that you want to read more than anything else, and it’s best to strike while the iron is hot.
Carol Ryrie Brink’s Winter Cottage, a wonderful book! Near the beginning of the Great Depression, Minty and Eggs are on the road with their sweet but feckless father when their car breaks down… right next to someone’s charming isolated lakeshore summer cottage. As their current destination is the back bedroom of an aunt who emphatically does not want to put them up, they make only some half-hearted attempts to fix the car before settling into the cottage for the winter. (Conveniently, they arrive with a winter’s worth of provisions, left over from their father’s latest failed business venture: a grocery store.) Exactly as cozy as a book with such a premise should be.
I also read Gerald Durrell’s Catch Me a Colobus, because I realized that the local library has a few of his books I hadn’t read and instantly could not survive another moment with a fresh Gerald Durrell book in my life. This one is a bit of a hodgepodge, I suspect because Durrell wrote it swiftly to get funds to shore up his zoo, which is mostly what the first third of the book is about, as he returned from a collecting trip to find the zoo hovering on the edge of bankruptcy. We continue on a trip to Sierra Leone for his first BBC series (this is the bit that the title comes from, as colobus monkeys are high on his list for the collecting trip), and end with a trip to Mexico to collect the rare Teporingo, a volcano-dwelling rabbit in danger of extinction.
Although hopping from continent to continent like this makes the book a bit formless, Durrell’s prose is a delight as always. I love his metaphors, perfectly apt and entirely unexpected: the “slight squeak” of a Teporingo, “like somebody rubbing a damp thumb over a balloon,” or the experience of walking through a forest of massive bamboo stalks, which “creak and groan musically” in the slightest wind; “It must have sounded like that rounding the Horn in an old sailing ship in high wind.”
What I’m Reading Now
Traipsing along in Women’s Weird. In any anthology, the quality is inevitably a bit uneven, but overall it’s quite high. The scariest story so far is May Sinclair’s “Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched” (a pair of lovers stuck together in Hell for all eternity, even though in life they deeply bored each other); Edith Wharton’s “Kerfol” is a classic spooky ghost story, while my favorite for sheer strength of voice is Edith Nesbit’s “The Shadow.” Oh, props to Margery Lawrence for making a saucepan deeply ominous in “The Haunted Saucepan.” The way it just sits there, boiling, on a cold stove…
I should be hitting D. K. Broster’s story (“Couching at the Door”) next week. Excited to report back!
What I Plan to Read Next
An account of getting distracted by Winter Cottage and Catch Me a Colobus, I have made almost no progress on the books I earnestly desired to make progress on last week. Well, such is the reading life. Sometimes a book comes along that you want to read more than anything else, and it’s best to strike while the iron is hot.
![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
