Reading Wednesday

[troisoiseaux]

Recently read

Finished The French Revolution by Ian Davidson, which was... fine? Fine/meh cusp? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I found myself wishing for more depth and a slightly less self-righteous tone, but credit where credit's due to Davidson for looking at the impact of the Revolution outside of Paris— I learned new information about both the war in Europe and the uprisings/ civil war elsewhere in France.

Read C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which I feel like I must have read as a kid (I may have only seen the 2005 movie?) and Prince Caspian, which I definitely didn't. Overall, I enjoyed both - especially Lewis' scene-setting/descriptions of Narnia - although hoo boy This Whole Thing Smacks of Gender (and also Imperialism, and Christian Allegory).

Currently reading

Currently reading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which I'm enjoying somewhat less, because I'm not sure which is more grating, Eustace Scrubb or whatever point C.S. Lewis was trying to make here, which I suspect is a 1950s version of complaining about liberal snowflakes...?

Continuing to make progress on Anna Karenina, although I'm definitely missing the historical context necessary to make sense of Levin's whole peasant land-reform thing.

Comments

[legionseagle]

I've always wondered how far Experiment House = Dartington Hall. He was in correspondence with a woman who taught (or had some admin post) at Dartington Hall who was in a bad marriage, and since we do get the moorland setting (which would rule out Bedales - and people I knew who'd been at Bedales looked on Dartington Hall as the place where one went when one had with extreme ingenuity made Bedales too hot to hold one) and the very laissez-faire attitude.

But nuance and Lewis in this instance were not on speaking terms.

[oursin]

And then you finally ended up at Summerhill with AS Neill...