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what i'm reading wednesday 3/9/2025
I don't have a ton to write about today, so I thought I would ask y'all a question! The weather is unnervingly autumnal here right now (just in the sense that it's unseasonable--that actual weather is delightful), and it's got me in a Fall Mood. (I have been listening to Loreena McKennitt, which tells you everything if you've known me for a long time.)
So: what is your favorite autumnal read? When the weather starts to turn, what do you start itching to read?
And now back to our regularly-scheduled program.
What I finished:
It's mostly been mysteries around here lately, which are the one thing I can always read, even when I'm too frazzled to focus on anything else. Over the past week or two I have read:
Sleeping Murder and The Body in the Library by Agatha Christie, The Confession and Proof of Guilt by Charles Todd, and The Religious Body by Catherine Aird. All enjoyable but I don't have much to say about them except to say that the Aird was set in a convent and I am always here for a book set in a convent!
The only other thing I read was Cheerful Weather for the Wedding by Julia Strachey. This one I picked up at one of my visits to Persephone Books some time ago, and I will be honest, I mostly picked this one out of a sea of pretty grey Persephone books because of her last name. I was like, "Lytton's sister???" (His niece, actually.) Because I am nothing if not a Bloomsbury Group girlie.
I wasn't crazy about this? I didn't dislike it, and Strachey was a good writer with a real knack both for physical description of locations and for characterization (the mother figure in the book is apparently based on her mother-in-law and is VERY well-drawn). I also thought it was cool that it takes place over the course of a couple of hours right before and after a wedding, so the aperture is very small in a way that I typically really appreciate.
But I also felt held at a distance from the characters, none of them were very likeable nor unlikable enough to be really compelling, and there didn't seem to be much of a point. Virginia Woolf raved about it, though, so I guess I am just wrong.
Still, it was very short, so I don't feel like I wasted my time reading it.
What I'm currently reading:
I started A Forgery of Fate. It's very readable and even though it's got the kind of first person POV that I often associate with badly-written YA books, there's enough going on that I think it will turn out to be worth reading.
So: what is your favorite autumnal read? When the weather starts to turn, what do you start itching to read?
And now back to our regularly-scheduled program.
What I finished:
It's mostly been mysteries around here lately, which are the one thing I can always read, even when I'm too frazzled to focus on anything else. Over the past week or two I have read:
Sleeping Murder and The Body in the Library by Agatha Christie, The Confession and Proof of Guilt by Charles Todd, and The Religious Body by Catherine Aird. All enjoyable but I don't have much to say about them except to say that the Aird was set in a convent and I am always here for a book set in a convent!
The only other thing I read was Cheerful Weather for the Wedding by Julia Strachey. This one I picked up at one of my visits to Persephone Books some time ago, and I will be honest, I mostly picked this one out of a sea of pretty grey Persephone books because of her last name. I was like, "Lytton's sister???" (His niece, actually.) Because I am nothing if not a Bloomsbury Group girlie.
I wasn't crazy about this? I didn't dislike it, and Strachey was a good writer with a real knack both for physical description of locations and for characterization (the mother figure in the book is apparently based on her mother-in-law and is VERY well-drawn). I also thought it was cool that it takes place over the course of a couple of hours right before and after a wedding, so the aperture is very small in a way that I typically really appreciate.
But I also felt held at a distance from the characters, none of them were very likeable nor unlikable enough to be really compelling, and there didn't seem to be much of a point. Virginia Woolf raved about it, though, so I guess I am just wrong.
Still, it was very short, so I don't feel like I wasted my time reading it.
What I'm currently reading:
I started A Forgery of Fate. It's very readable and even though it's got the kind of first person POV that I often associate with badly-written YA books, there's enough going on that I think it will turn out to be worth reading.
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This is it exactly! To the last line, I kept waiting for it to come together and it just didn't.
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My favourite autumnal book is Lolly Willowes—all those beautiful brown autumn beech leaves...
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Ooooh, maybe I'll reread Lolly Willowes...
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Every fall for the past *mumble* years I've been like "I should re-read Lord of the Rings" and then I don't...... perhaps this year??
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The Wind in the Willows! Wuthering Heights! The Turn of the Screw! The City of Dreaming Books! Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell! Oh, and Sylvia Plath's poetry! <3
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In general, I feel that autumnal reading should have a contemplative and elegiac tone. A lot of medieval literature has the latter, a sense of loss and grief hovering in the background, even if the subject matter is superficially uplifting. I guess a lot of Arthuriana (whether medieval or not) has this same sense — or at least that's what I'm wanting from my Arthuriana — a story of something with a beautiful, admirable potential that carries the seeds of its own destruction from the beginning, being mourned before the story has even begun to unfold.
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Completely agree with your last paragraph!!!!
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