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

[kore]

It's very "LOL liberal snowflakes," down to the mocking of health stuff, which has uh not aged well!

I think I just powered through most of the peasant stuff in Anna K, not skimming exactly, but kind of like when you eat something you don't like fast to get it over with.

[oursin]

It's like, 'these are the awful people who were responsible for the 1945 Labour Government, the NHS, the Welfare State, the 1944 Education Act, and The Fall of Civilisation As We Know It!' (My personal head-canon is that of course Alberta is a pillar of the local family-planning clinic, o, the horror...)

My current research project, or one of them, is pretty much on the kind of people the Scrubbs were, and yay for them, too, even with the sometimes sillinesses.