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Reading Woman on a Couch by Isaac Israels
via Wikimedia Commons[/caption]
strong>Reading Notes January 2019
I joined two online reading groups and started reading Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov and Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? Ambitious? Yes. Foolishly so? Perhaps. Only time will tell.
I abandoned The Bear and the Nightingale. I didn’t like where the story was going. I had no assurance I’d like where it ended up. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to read two sequels to find out where it was going. It just felt like the church people were bad and the magic people were good and the church people were oppressing the magic. Maybe the book will eventually get more complicated than that, but really that’s just not a worldview I’m all that excited by. I prefer magical worlds where Christians aren’t automatically opposed to magic and aren’t the enemy. At least not the enemy because they are Christians.
I made progress in Ron Chernow’s Hamilton. Slowly, slowly. I’m reading about a page a day. But it’s a pace that actually works.
I made progress in Craeft by Andrew Langlands and I began reading The Haunting of Hill House.
I’ve been reading A.E. Stallings new poetry collection, Like.
I began reading The People of the Sea, a collection of stories about selkies that’s been on my shelf forever.
With the kids I finished reading Home is the Sailor by Rumer Godden, one of her doll stories, the only one with a boy doll as the star of the show. I really like it.
Reading Notes February 2019
Continuing to read Brothers Karamazov and Can You Forgive Her and Hamilton“>Hamilton. Falling behind the reading group in Brother’s K. But keeping up with Can You Forgive Her. I want to read ahead, actually.
Finished reading Craeft by Andrew Langlands.
I began listening to the audio book of Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey. I’m really loving it.
I finished reading Clouds of Witness and Whose Body? by Dorothy Sayers. Began reading Unnatural Death.
I read Farmer Giles of Ham to the kids. Also finished books about Michael Faraday and Saint Peter Claver. Began reading A Wrinkle in Time. We’re listening to Peter Duck in the car when Daddy is with us and to The Saturdays when he isn’t.
Sayers is a huge thing in my house. Cecilia keeps rereading her because other authors come up short.
I’m re-reading the Space Trilogy for the first time in years, and nearly done “The Making of the Middle Ages” on the non-fiction front.
I want to carve out some time for language study every day this spring, trying to figure out how, because I miss my Greek and want it back.
I haven’t read Sayers for decades and so it’s fun coming at them with new eyes. I remember loving Peter Wimsey, but man there’s a lot of these books I’d forgotten.
The Space Trilogy is another one I’ve not revisited since I was a young adult. I only ever read them once. And Perelandra was the one that really left a strong impression.