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Reading Wednesday, with only two updates -- both big ones:
Finished:
From The Earthly Paradise, William Morris: “Bellerophon in Lycia” (new read) and “The Hill of Venus” (reread) -- The former is less cohesive than the first half of the story, because episodic, but I really like Morris’s chimera as an inchoate embodiment of fear and how this plays into the themes built into Bellerophon’s arc. I also like the multiple perspectives grounded in the details of ordinary lives. And with that one, I finished reading, in pieces over years, the entirety of The Earthly Paradise. I see why, say, The Ring and the Book or Aurora Leigh are better matches for what modern and contemporary taste values in poetry, but I still regret that EP is no longer a standard of our canon. I wish more people read it. (But then, I’ve been saying that of The City of Dreadful Night for thirty years and see how effective that’s been.) (You all have read The City of Dreadful Night, right? Right? Bueller?) In other news, “The Hill of Venus” remains the oddest Tannhauser retelling I’ve met.
In progress:
Chongfei Manual, Feng He You Yue -- When I mentioned a time-skip to the romance implied by “pampered consort” in the title, I was assuming that (as in other historical novels I’ve read) it’d be to when the protagonist was at the age of majority of 15.* I assumed wrong. So a belated CONTENT WARNING: 13-year-old girl in sexual situations with a boundary-pushing 22-year-old man. The author is also pushing boundaries hard. And pushing disbelief with just how often the protagonist is unchaperoned by what should be omnipresent servants. I am up chapter 83, proceeding cautiously and with much hesitation.
Plus various poetry to be accounted for when finished.
* More than a year or two older would be unlikely, if welcome: as in parts and eras of medieval western Europe, aristocratic Chinese women were often married off soon after they came of age to cement family alliances.
---L.
Subject quote from The Earthly Paradise, Bellerophon at Argos, William Morris.
Finished:
From The Earthly Paradise, William Morris: “Bellerophon in Lycia” (new read) and “The Hill of Venus” (reread) -- The former is less cohesive than the first half of the story, because episodic, but I really like Morris’s chimera as an inchoate embodiment of fear and how this plays into the themes built into Bellerophon’s arc. I also like the multiple perspectives grounded in the details of ordinary lives. And with that one, I finished reading, in pieces over years, the entirety of The Earthly Paradise. I see why, say, The Ring and the Book or Aurora Leigh are better matches for what modern and contemporary taste values in poetry, but I still regret that EP is no longer a standard of our canon. I wish more people read it. (But then, I’ve been saying that of The City of Dreadful Night for thirty years and see how effective that’s been.) (You all have read The City of Dreadful Night, right? Right? Bueller?) In other news, “The Hill of Venus” remains the oddest Tannhauser retelling I’ve met.
In progress:
Chongfei Manual, Feng He You Yue -- When I mentioned a time-skip to the romance implied by “pampered consort” in the title, I was assuming that (as in other historical novels I’ve read) it’d be to when the protagonist was at the age of majority of 15.* I assumed wrong. So a belated CONTENT WARNING: 13-year-old girl in sexual situations with a boundary-pushing 22-year-old man. The author is also pushing boundaries hard. And pushing disbelief with just how often the protagonist is unchaperoned by what should be omnipresent servants. I am up chapter 83, proceeding cautiously and with much hesitation.
Plus various poetry to be accounted for when finished.
* More than a year or two older would be unlikely, if welcome: as in parts and eras of medieval western Europe, aristocratic Chinese women were often married off soon after they came of age to cement family alliances.
---L.
Subject quote from The Earthly Paradise, Bellerophon at Argos, William Morris.