![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
reading I am doing
Sep. 4th, 2020 11:02 amI found the library copy of Masha Gessen's Dead Again: The Russian Intelligentsia After Communism so now I can go back to reading that! At least until I misplace it again.
I am almost done with The Three Musketeers (the Richard Pevear translation from 2006) and when I am done I will reread Brust's The Phoenix Guards for perhaps the third time, but this time able to enjoy all the things he does with the original as well as the pleasures of the book itself.
I am about 3/4 of the way through Daughter of Mystery (by Heather Rose Jones) which is a queer Ruritanian fantasy of manners, delightful but a slow read. I am similarly 3/4 of the way through Yoon Ha Lee's Hexarachate Stories which is making me want to reread the Machineries of Empire trilogy.
Then there are a slew of books I am about 15% into -- far enough that I am definitely reading them (unless they slowly bore or abruptly disappoint) but not so far that they have shorted themselves into priority yet: England Their England which is a satirical novel from 1933, and Pratchett's Wintersmith, and Anderby Wold by Winifred Holtby (her first novel, 1923) and Diana Abu-Jaber's beautiful Crescent which is one of those books I keep slowing to a crawl on because every other paragraph there's something about her prose goes to the back of my brain and then I just want to stop and savour it rather than reading more.
Finally, a few long books I am just starting on: Glittering Images by Susan Howatch, terrible melodramatic CoE spiritual drama that I remember being pleasant junk food when I read it 20 years ago, and The Sleepwalkers by Christopher Clark about the beginning of WWI (so far very good) and Life in Culture which is a collection of Lionel Trilling's letters which I may give up on because while his ideas are interesting he is so neurotic and serious all the time that it is making me anxious to read. And extra-finally and delightfully I am beginning my first reread of Cao Xueqin's Hong Lou Meng, in the David Hawkes translation from 1973-1977 (which seems to be the most recent?), and feeling all over again the excitement of all the mysteries surrounding the author's life and the identity of the various commentators and so forth, with the added joy that unlike the first time I read it there is a much more robust Internet to find information on, plus a few decades more scholarship. (The actual book is great too! But I am just in the introduction where Hawkes explains about Redology and brings up some of what the big questions were back when he was working on it, so I am not yet to the enjoyment of the novel itself.)
Time to assist in 2nd grade ELA! I am pleased to say that today my son is doing a marvelous job today of completing the tasks he needs to complete and keeping himself happily busy otherwise. And it is Friday before a three day weekend, how glorious.
I am almost done with The Three Musketeers (the Richard Pevear translation from 2006) and when I am done I will reread Brust's The Phoenix Guards for perhaps the third time, but this time able to enjoy all the things he does with the original as well as the pleasures of the book itself.
I am about 3/4 of the way through Daughter of Mystery (by Heather Rose Jones) which is a queer Ruritanian fantasy of manners, delightful but a slow read. I am similarly 3/4 of the way through Yoon Ha Lee's Hexarachate Stories which is making me want to reread the Machineries of Empire trilogy.
Then there are a slew of books I am about 15% into -- far enough that I am definitely reading them (unless they slowly bore or abruptly disappoint) but not so far that they have shorted themselves into priority yet: England Their England which is a satirical novel from 1933, and Pratchett's Wintersmith, and Anderby Wold by Winifred Holtby (her first novel, 1923) and Diana Abu-Jaber's beautiful Crescent which is one of those books I keep slowing to a crawl on because every other paragraph there's something about her prose goes to the back of my brain and then I just want to stop and savour it rather than reading more.
Finally, a few long books I am just starting on: Glittering Images by Susan Howatch, terrible melodramatic CoE spiritual drama that I remember being pleasant junk food when I read it 20 years ago, and The Sleepwalkers by Christopher Clark about the beginning of WWI (so far very good) and Life in Culture which is a collection of Lionel Trilling's letters which I may give up on because while his ideas are interesting he is so neurotic and serious all the time that it is making me anxious to read. And extra-finally and delightfully I am beginning my first reread of Cao Xueqin's Hong Lou Meng, in the David Hawkes translation from 1973-1977 (which seems to be the most recent?), and feeling all over again the excitement of all the mysteries surrounding the author's life and the identity of the various commentators and so forth, with the added joy that unlike the first time I read it there is a much more robust Internet to find information on, plus a few decades more scholarship. (The actual book is great too! But I am just in the introduction where Hawkes explains about Redology and brings up some of what the big questions were back when he was working on it, so I am not yet to the enjoyment of the novel itself.)
Time to assist in 2nd grade ELA! I am pleased to say that today my son is doing a marvelous job today of completing the tasks he needs to complete and keeping himself happily busy otherwise. And it is Friday before a three day weekend, how glorious.
