Trying my best to arrive
This morning was marked by construction on a loudly adjacent street, a constant window-juddering for hours from which I finally managed to fall asleep just in time to wake up for my doctor's apppointment. The amount of sleep on which I have run this last week is not sufficient to sustain intelligence. This meme I stole from ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
foxmoth might still have required thought to complete: the seven deadly sins of reading.
1. Lust, books I want to read for their cover.
None at the moment, but the mysterious attractiveness of cover art has in the past memorably led me to check out P. C. Hodgell's God Stalk (1982), Larry Niven's The Integral Trees (1984), and Tanith Lee's The Book of the Damned (1988).
2. Pride, challenging books I've finished.
In terms of personal time put in, Alasdair Gray's Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981), Robert Serber's The Los Alamos Primer: The First Lectures on How to Build an Atomic Bomb (1992), and Yiannis (Anastasios Ioannis) Metaxas' Μετά όμως, μετά . . . (2017).
3. Gluttony, books I've read more than once.
I don't even keep track! Elizabeth Goudge's The Valley of Song (1951), Mary Renault's The Mask of Apollo (1966), Ursula K. Le Guin's The Complete Orsinia (2016).
4. Sloth, books on my to-read list the longest.
I don't keep a to-read list. I have failed to get around to whole chunks of the Western canon in English.
5. Greed, books I own multiple editions of.
Not counting books that had to be re-bought specifically because their original editions were perishing through use, Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita (1967), Patricia A. McKillip's Riddle-Master (1976–79), and Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast (1946–59).
6. Wrath, books I despised.
Books I disliked seem to slip from my mind more easily than the other kind, but I bounced definitely off Josephine Tey's The Franchise Affair (1948), Alan Moore's Watchmen (1987), and A. S. Byatt's The Children's Book (2009).
7. Envy, books I want to live in.
I do not want to live in most of the books I read for a variety of reasons, but from elementary through high school the answer would have been hands-down, one-way, Anne McCaffrey's Pern. These days I would take a study abroad in Greer Gilman's Cloud. Lloyd Alexander's Prydain remains the site of my sole official, never-written self-insert.
Appropriately enough to wind up a book meme, I have just been given two poetry collections in modern Greek by the friend of the family who has the olive groves outside Sparti. I remain amateur in the language and the Nikos Kavvadias looks incredibly maritime.
foxmoth might still have required thought to complete: the seven deadly sins of reading.1. Lust, books I want to read for their cover.
None at the moment, but the mysterious attractiveness of cover art has in the past memorably led me to check out P. C. Hodgell's God Stalk (1982), Larry Niven's The Integral Trees (1984), and Tanith Lee's The Book of the Damned (1988).
2. Pride, challenging books I've finished.
In terms of personal time put in, Alasdair Gray's Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981), Robert Serber's The Los Alamos Primer: The First Lectures on How to Build an Atomic Bomb (1992), and Yiannis (Anastasios Ioannis) Metaxas' Μετά όμως, μετά . . . (2017).
3. Gluttony, books I've read more than once.
I don't even keep track! Elizabeth Goudge's The Valley of Song (1951), Mary Renault's The Mask of Apollo (1966), Ursula K. Le Guin's The Complete Orsinia (2016).
4. Sloth, books on my to-read list the longest.
I don't keep a to-read list. I have failed to get around to whole chunks of the Western canon in English.
5. Greed, books I own multiple editions of.
Not counting books that had to be re-bought specifically because their original editions were perishing through use, Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita (1967), Patricia A. McKillip's Riddle-Master (1976–79), and Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast (1946–59).
6. Wrath, books I despised.
Books I disliked seem to slip from my mind more easily than the other kind, but I bounced definitely off Josephine Tey's The Franchise Affair (1948), Alan Moore's Watchmen (1987), and A. S. Byatt's The Children's Book (2009).
7. Envy, books I want to live in.
I do not want to live in most of the books I read for a variety of reasons, but from elementary through high school the answer would have been hands-down, one-way, Anne McCaffrey's Pern. These days I would take a study abroad in Greer Gilman's Cloud. Lloyd Alexander's Prydain remains the site of my sole official, never-written self-insert.
Appropriately enough to wind up a book meme, I have just been given two poetry collections in modern Greek by the friend of the family who has the olive groves outside Sparti. I remain amateur in the language and the Nikos Kavvadias looks incredibly maritime.
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Also, glad to have this datapoint on A. S. Byatt's The Children's Book, as I've been going back and forth about whether to read more of her books since I read Possession. Maybe steer clear of The Children's Book if I do ever decide to return to Byatt's work.
I'm definitely been meaning to read more Elizabeth Goudge, and I'll have to bump The Valley of Song to the top of the list.
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I look forward to your answers!
Also, glad to have this datapoint on A. S. Byatt's The Children's Book, as I've been going back and forth about whether to read more of her books since I read Possession. Maybe steer clear of The Children's Book if I do ever decide to return to Byatt's work.
The inconsistency of its distance from reality burned me: in the service of proving her thesis that the writing of classic literature for children is inherently exploitative of the writers' own children, Byatt essentially assigned much worse cases from the lives of other writers to her protagonist, who is such an obvious stand-in for E. Nesbit with the specifics of her polyamorous home life and her Fabian politics that it felt like character assassination, especially since Nesbit actually was not an author like Milne or Grahame or Barrie who derived her most famous books from material originally, privately invented for the family. I enjoy most of Byatt's short fiction and really love the second novella of Angels & Insects (1992), the first half of Elementals (1998), and the Loki and autofictional frame of Ragnarok (2011).
I'm definitely been meaning to read more Elizabeth Goudge, and I'll have to bump The Valley of Song to the top of the list.
It was my formative Goudge and still far and away my favorite. I have written occasionally about it, but most extensively in context of other Goudge.
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Look, I didn't like the book very much! It was all right until I realized what she had done with compositing her barely filed off artists, which included paralleling her Nesbit stand-in with her stand-in for Eric Gill. If what she really wanted to write was a meditation on the esssential destructiveness of art, she should not have dragged children's literature specifically into it. And even once she'd done that, she needed to get a lot farther from her source material of real lives. I don't recall that she dealt with an author like Lewis. She just ran with the pattern of tragically devoured children, which feels much worse to me to transpose onto a mother. Anyway, Christopher Awdry grew up to be the sort of person who writes an Encyclopedia of British Railway Companies off his own bat.
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I don't think I've read her other novels. Not sure if I've read any of her shorts.
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Well, fortunately for her, I didn't like Possession that much, either.
I don't think I've read her other novels. Not sure if I've read any of her shorts.
I did not really connect with any of her novels beyond their prose, which I always found both acute and luxurious: The Children's Book is just the one I have actual argument with. I believe I started reading her seriously with the collection The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (1994), which reminds me that I still want to see George Miller's Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022). I would consider just about any of her short fiction worth picking up and trying.