troisoiseaux (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
troisoiseaux) wrote2019-12-11 07:46 am
troisoiseaux) wrote2019-12-11 07:46 am
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Reading Wednesday
Recently read
99. Having recently remembered the existence of Louisa May Alcott's non-March-family-centric or -adjacent novels, I picked up her novel Eight Cousins, which is another one that I know for sure I read when I was 10-11 but had entirely forgotten in the years since.
To be honest, I enjoyed this one less than An Old-Fashioned Girl. Largely this is because it was even more blatantly a vehicle for Alcott's opinions on child-rearing, some of which admittedly still hold up - communicate with your kids! don't start enforcing gender roles too early! (or, you know, ever, but hey, points for getting that far in 1875) - and some of which don't. Example: pearl-clutching over the fact that the adventures in Boys' Adventure Books are - gasp! - unrealistic, and introduce their impressionable young readers to such scandalous flights of fancy as children captaining ships and millionaires adopting winsome orphans. Not to mention the slang! All of this came from the aunt that was An Ideal Mom, as opposed to the ones that were over-vain or over-fretful, and thus Not Ideal Moms, so evidently Alcott actually meant it?
There are some other 19th-century-isms that don't hold up great, including outright racism (as opposed to An Old-Fashioned Girl, which was merely rude about the Irish) and some... weird implications, vis-a-vis the types of relationships which were once appropriate between first cousins but now super, super aren't. This apparently gets even weirder and less implied in the sequel.
100. Just finished Doxology by Nell Zink, which is a novel I've struggled to figure out how to describe even as I've texted most of my friends from college about it over the past couple of days, since at one point it features (and has some very acerbic, if not inaccurate, comments about) our alma mater.
I think, at the heart of it, Doxology is a ghost story. The novel begins with a trio of friends in early 1990s New York City, where their dreams of making it big as a punk band is derailed as much by an unplanned pregnancy and shotgun wedding as the fact that they're a pretty terrible band. The third member of the group, Joe, actually does end up with a successful career as a musician, but he remains close to Pam and Daniel, helping to raise their daughter, Flora, until...
Joe dies of an accidental overdose on 9/11, after his girlfriend convinces him to do heroin with her for the first time. He ends up becoming a cult figure inexorably tied to the tragedy of the day, the mainstream rumor being that he committed suicide out of a prescient hopelessness for the future when in fact he never lived to find out about the attacks. He remains a significant figure throughout the novel, a sort of fragmented, Rorschach blot of a ghost in the memories of the people he left behind, public opinion, people trying to manipulate public opinion, and - most prominently, in a narrative sense - Flora.
The rest of the book dwells a lot on themes of generational divides - millennial Flora, her Gen X parents, and baby boomer grandparents - and a lot on modern politics, mostly re: the futility thereof. The last chunk of plot is set against the backdrop of the 2016 election, so that was... ugh.
To read next
My new goal is to finish Nicholas Nickleby by the end of this year; I'm about halfway through, so I feel like this is achievable? I also just got my turn for Sarah Perry's The Essex Serpent on Libby, which I completely forgot I'd put on hold back in September.
99. Having recently remembered the existence of Louisa May Alcott's non-March-family-centric or -adjacent novels, I picked up her novel Eight Cousins, which is another one that I know for sure I read when I was 10-11 but had entirely forgotten in the years since.
To be honest, I enjoyed this one less than An Old-Fashioned Girl. Largely this is because it was even more blatantly a vehicle for Alcott's opinions on child-rearing, some of which admittedly still hold up - communicate with your kids! don't start enforcing gender roles too early! (or, you know, ever, but hey, points for getting that far in 1875) - and some of which don't. Example: pearl-clutching over the fact that the adventures in Boys' Adventure Books are - gasp! - unrealistic, and introduce their impressionable young readers to such scandalous flights of fancy as children captaining ships and millionaires adopting winsome orphans. Not to mention the slang! All of this came from the aunt that was An Ideal Mom, as opposed to the ones that were over-vain or over-fretful, and thus Not Ideal Moms, so evidently Alcott actually meant it?
There are some other 19th-century-isms that don't hold up great, including outright racism (as opposed to An Old-Fashioned Girl, which was merely rude about the Irish) and some... weird implications, vis-a-vis the types of relationships which were once appropriate between first cousins but now super, super aren't. This apparently gets even weirder and less implied in the sequel.
100. Just finished Doxology by Nell Zink, which is a novel I've struggled to figure out how to describe even as I've texted most of my friends from college about it over the past couple of days, since at one point it features (and has some very acerbic, if not inaccurate, comments about) our alma mater.
I think, at the heart of it, Doxology is a ghost story. The novel begins with a trio of friends in early 1990s New York City, where their dreams of making it big as a punk band is derailed as much by an unplanned pregnancy and shotgun wedding as the fact that they're a pretty terrible band. The third member of the group, Joe, actually does end up with a successful career as a musician, but he remains close to Pam and Daniel, helping to raise their daughter, Flora, until...
Joe dies of an accidental overdose on 9/11, after his girlfriend convinces him to do heroin with her for the first time. He ends up becoming a cult figure inexorably tied to the tragedy of the day, the mainstream rumor being that he committed suicide out of a prescient hopelessness for the future when in fact he never lived to find out about the attacks. He remains a significant figure throughout the novel, a sort of fragmented, Rorschach blot of a ghost in the memories of the people he left behind, public opinion, people trying to manipulate public opinion, and - most prominently, in a narrative sense - Flora.
The rest of the book dwells a lot on themes of generational divides - millennial Flora, her Gen X parents, and baby boomer grandparents - and a lot on modern politics, mostly re: the futility thereof. The last chunk of plot is set against the backdrop of the 2016 election, so that was... ugh.
To read next
My new goal is to finish Nicholas Nickleby by the end of this year; I'm about halfway through, so I feel like this is achievable? I also just got my turn for Sarah Perry's The Essex Serpent on Libby, which I completely forgot I'd put on hold back in September.
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I was exposed first by way of Scrooge/A Christmas Carol (1951), after some number of viewings of which I read the novella, but my first Dickens novel was A Tale of Two Cities, which I was assigned in tenth grade.
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I remember exactly what our very old hardcover of it looked like, I know I read it because I read all the Alcott in the house after Little Women, and I can also remember jack.
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Is this a cousin marriage thing?
(Full disclosure: I don't find the idea that weird, but I didn't grow up with cousins, so it may be that I just never had the Westermarck effect kick in.)
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I did grow up in a big, close-knit family of cousins, so... yeah, no, that is deeply weird to me. On the other hand— I don't remember being as weirded out in the case of, say, Nikolai and Sonya in War & Peace? Hmm. (Then again, I think I was distracted by the feeling that Nikolai and Sonya had a much bigger relationship hurdle on their hands, namely that Nikolai.............. did not strike me as exceedingly heterosexual.)