Reading Wednesday
30 January 2013 07:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
larryhammerI am memesheep, hear me bleat!
What I'm reading now: I'm trying to keep myself down to three main readings in progress. This sometimes works. Right now, officially it's Poetica Erotica, a 1921 anthology of "curious and rare amatory verse" edited by T.R. Smith, which is more interesting with the Victorians and Decadents than the early Modernists (I assume there's an observer effect going on here); The Queen's Necklace by Alexandre Dumas, a romance of Marie Antoinette; and my usual page-or-so-a-day on 銀河鉄道の夜 by Kenji Miyazawa, in which mysterious things are happening at a town festival dedicated to the constellation Centaurus. But, yanno, there's always the stray potshotting through other poetry anthologies, including The Book of Elizabethan Verse and The Golden Treasury, to name two with current bookmarks.
What I've just finished: The Corsican Brothers by Alexandre Dumas, which turns out to be a novella, one more tightly plotted than I've come to expect from him -- using a narrator who shares the author's personal name and public career does an interesting job of adding versimilatude; and this Arsene Lupin novel (I'm not sure which one it's a translation of) by Maurice Leblanc, a classic caper novel set in Belle Époque Paris that was a good enough adventure but left a skeezy aftertaste that made me want to cleanse my pallet with Colette. Or more Dumas.
What I'll read next: Probably the next novel will be Half Prince volume 5. When I run out of volumes of that, I'll probably return to Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, now that I've found the copy I lost track of around Christmas. On deck for poetry, I'm looking at either returning to my Orlando Furioso reread (when we last saw our heroes, we were just starting canto 36 and its epically embarassing bitchfight between Our Designated Heroine and her fiance's sister) or settling into another country in Poems of Places. For Japanese practice, well, we'll see when we finish travelling the Galactic Railroad -- though I do have a manga adaptation of The Tale of Genji that could be fun to work through.
---L.
What I'm reading now: I'm trying to keep myself down to three main readings in progress. This sometimes works. Right now, officially it's Poetica Erotica, a 1921 anthology of "curious and rare amatory verse" edited by T.R. Smith, which is more interesting with the Victorians and Decadents than the early Modernists (I assume there's an observer effect going on here); The Queen's Necklace by Alexandre Dumas, a romance of Marie Antoinette; and my usual page-or-so-a-day on 銀河鉄道の夜 by Kenji Miyazawa, in which mysterious things are happening at a town festival dedicated to the constellation Centaurus. But, yanno, there's always the stray potshotting through other poetry anthologies, including The Book of Elizabethan Verse and The Golden Treasury, to name two with current bookmarks.
What I've just finished: The Corsican Brothers by Alexandre Dumas, which turns out to be a novella, one more tightly plotted than I've come to expect from him -- using a narrator who shares the author's personal name and public career does an interesting job of adding versimilatude; and this Arsene Lupin novel (I'm not sure which one it's a translation of) by Maurice Leblanc, a classic caper novel set in Belle Époque Paris that was a good enough adventure but left a skeezy aftertaste that made me want to cleanse my pallet with Colette. Or more Dumas.
What I'll read next: Probably the next novel will be Half Prince volume 5. When I run out of volumes of that, I'll probably return to Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, now that I've found the copy I lost track of around Christmas. On deck for poetry, I'm looking at either returning to my Orlando Furioso reread (when we last saw our heroes, we were just starting canto 36 and its epically embarassing bitchfight between Our Designated Heroine and her fiance's sister) or settling into another country in Poems of Places. For Japanese practice, well, we'll see when we finish travelling the Galactic Railroad -- though I do have a manga adaptation of The Tale of Genji that could be fun to work through.
---L.
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Date: 30 January 2013 08:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 31 January 2013 12:22 am (UTC)---L.
no subject
Date: 30 January 2013 11:44 pm (UTC)icon used for relevant art, not mood
Date: 31 January 2013 12:28 am (UTC)I have a box set of Asaki yume mishi, courtesy my neighbor. She apparently liked it when she was young.
---L.
Re: icon used for relevant art, not mood
Date: 4 February 2013 07:41 am (UTC)(Incidentally, what I meant by the original comment wasn't a sneer but rather a combination of "It's quite visually appealing" and "Everyone knows what's in Asaki Yume o Mishi, but hardly anyone's actually read the source text." Just in case there was any misunderstanding.)
Re: icon used for relevant art, not mood
Date: 4 February 2013 02:41 pm (UTC)---L.