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Reading Wednesday
Sep. 4th, 2019 07:38 amRecently read
I finished Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, which I cannot recommend enough. She writes with clarity and insight on both the personal and political(/historical/social/whatever); reading her essays felt like watching her hold things and concepts, common to the point of numbness, up to the light to highlight their flaws and, occasionally, beauty. My favorites were “The I in Internet,” on the problems with internet culture and how we got there, and “The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams,” from Fyre Fest to Uber to the student debt and subprime mortgage crises. Other essays touched on athleisure, the wedding industry, literary heroines, pop-culture feminism in the age of Trump, and the time she was on a reality show as a teenager. She also wrote a couple of essays that wove together different topics – evangelical Christianity and drugs and rap music; campus sexual assault and ethics in journalism and the history of the University of Virginia – remarkably well, finding connections both obvious and less so.
I picked up The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark, expecting to enjoy it because it falls into one of my favorite niche plot types, Weird Stuff Happening At All-Girl Schools. What I was not expecting was for it to grab onto my heart, dig its fingers in, and twist. I liked the timey-wimey-ness of the narrative, like shuffling a deck of cards made up of snapshots of the Brodie set as little girls and then as adults. I especially loved Sandy— weird, intense Sandy, who holds imaginary conversations with her favorite fictional characters and obsesses about her teacher’s love life and makes the earth-shattering discovery that “there were other people’s Edinburghs quite different from hers” and then gets really into psychology and religion. Muriel Spark does a really good job of evoking the funhouse-mirror sense of reality that comes from being 12 (or 13, 14, etc.) and convinced you know how the world works and adults behave, meeting the fact that you really, really don’t. (Sandy and her best friend, Jenny, draft a fake love letter from Miss Brodie to the music teacher they suspect she’s sleeping with, which includes the memorable line “Allow me, in conclusion, to congratulate you warmly upon your sexual intercourse, as well as your singing.”)
Miss Brodie herself struck me as creepy and manipulative and kind of sad. There’s an interesting parallel between Sandy’s crush on the policewoman (albeit an imaginary version largely of her own making) and Miss Brodie’s attempt at an affair-by-proxy with the art teacher – the way she kept pumping the girls for information, and living vicariously through their interactions with him, echoed Sandy pestering Jenny with questions about the policewoman – but that just emphasized how bizarre a situation it was. I’d call it childish, even, if not for her taking things from weird to downright nefarious and grooming one of her students to sleep with the man she was in love with?? WTF.
Currently reading
Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin, on the other hand, reached out and cradled my face in both hands and whispered, “I have seen your heart’s desire,” because this book feels like it was written to appeal to me specifically. I’ve adored the story of Tam Lin since discovering it via Anais Mitchell’s version a few years ago, and I’m thrilled with how it’s unfolding in this ’70s college AU— Janet and Tam Lin (Thomas Lane) meet in the library and immediately get into an argument over a book of medieval poetry, which I felt *shrug emoji* about as a ‘translation’ until it hit me that the poem was about a rose!!! The main characters are the kind of people that, in high school, I fantasized about meeting in college; they quote books and poetry at each other in the course of normal conversation and have intense feelings about Shakespeare.
Current questions, WHICH I DON’T WANT SPOILED, PLEASE, I cannot wait to see how it plays out: Classics department = fairy court? Are they actually fairies, otherwise immortal/supernatural, or just kind of cult-y? Why is it always the Classics majors? How does Nick fit into this? Is Professor Medeous the fairy queen? (I’d suspected Janet’s guidance counselor, at first, but after The Revenger’s Tragedy...) When are Janet andTam Lin Thomas going to hook up?!
Up next
None in mind at the moment, actually. It’s T minus 2 and a half weeks until I take the LSAT, so I’m debating the wisdom of starting any new books until that’s over and done with.
I finished Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, which I cannot recommend enough. She writes with clarity and insight on both the personal and political(/historical/social/whatever); reading her essays felt like watching her hold things and concepts, common to the point of numbness, up to the light to highlight their flaws and, occasionally, beauty. My favorites were “The I in Internet,” on the problems with internet culture and how we got there, and “The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams,” from Fyre Fest to Uber to the student debt and subprime mortgage crises. Other essays touched on athleisure, the wedding industry, literary heroines, pop-culture feminism in the age of Trump, and the time she was on a reality show as a teenager. She also wrote a couple of essays that wove together different topics – evangelical Christianity and drugs and rap music; campus sexual assault and ethics in journalism and the history of the University of Virginia – remarkably well, finding connections both obvious and less so.
I picked up The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark, expecting to enjoy it because it falls into one of my favorite niche plot types, Weird Stuff Happening At All-Girl Schools. What I was not expecting was for it to grab onto my heart, dig its fingers in, and twist. I liked the timey-wimey-ness of the narrative, like shuffling a deck of cards made up of snapshots of the Brodie set as little girls and then as adults. I especially loved Sandy— weird, intense Sandy, who holds imaginary conversations with her favorite fictional characters and obsesses about her teacher’s love life and makes the earth-shattering discovery that “there were other people’s Edinburghs quite different from hers” and then gets really into psychology and religion. Muriel Spark does a really good job of evoking the funhouse-mirror sense of reality that comes from being 12 (or 13, 14, etc.) and convinced you know how the world works and adults behave, meeting the fact that you really, really don’t. (Sandy and her best friend, Jenny, draft a fake love letter from Miss Brodie to the music teacher they suspect she’s sleeping with, which includes the memorable line “Allow me, in conclusion, to congratulate you warmly upon your sexual intercourse, as well as your singing.”)
Miss Brodie herself struck me as creepy and manipulative and kind of sad. There’s an interesting parallel between Sandy’s crush on the policewoman (albeit an imaginary version largely of her own making) and Miss Brodie’s attempt at an affair-by-proxy with the art teacher – the way she kept pumping the girls for information, and living vicariously through their interactions with him, echoed Sandy pestering Jenny with questions about the policewoman – but that just emphasized how bizarre a situation it was. I’d call it childish, even, if not for her taking things from weird to downright nefarious and grooming one of her students to sleep with the man she was in love with?? WTF.
Currently reading
Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin, on the other hand, reached out and cradled my face in both hands and whispered, “I have seen your heart’s desire,” because this book feels like it was written to appeal to me specifically. I’ve adored the story of Tam Lin since discovering it via Anais Mitchell’s version a few years ago, and I’m thrilled with how it’s unfolding in this ’70s college AU— Janet and Tam Lin (Thomas Lane) meet in the library and immediately get into an argument over a book of medieval poetry, which I felt *shrug emoji* about as a ‘translation’ until it hit me that the poem was about a rose!!! The main characters are the kind of people that, in high school, I fantasized about meeting in college; they quote books and poetry at each other in the course of normal conversation and have intense feelings about Shakespeare.
Current questions, WHICH I DON’T WANT SPOILED, PLEASE, I cannot wait to see how it plays out: Classics department = fairy court? Are they actually fairies, otherwise immortal/supernatural, or just kind of cult-y? Why is it always the Classics majors? How does Nick fit into this? Is Professor Medeous the fairy queen? (I’d suspected Janet’s guidance counselor, at first, but after The Revenger’s Tragedy...) When are Janet and
Up next
None in mind at the moment, actually. It’s T minus 2 and a half weeks until I take the LSAT, so I’m debating the wisdom of starting any new books until that’s over and done with.
