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larryhammerReading!
Finished since last report:
The Tombs of Atuan and The Farthest Shore, Ursula K. Le Guin -- vacation reading, and Janni had dibs on A Wizard of Earthsea. It's always nice to return to formative books and remember that they are, in fact, Very Good. I still don't think the tension in Shore between the teen POV needed for a YA and the continuing adventures of a now middle-aged series protagonist is balanced entirely effectively. (It is telling that, in my teenage attempt to write a fantasy by filing off the serial numbers of Shore, I aged not!Ged down considerably.) But even with the shortcomings that Le Guin tried to later rectify, she is very wise, and these are still wonderful books.
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, The Byron. I'm torn. On the one hand, Canto 4 has a lot of the best pure poetry of the whole hodgepodge, plus the Harold character* is finally dropped leaving just The Byron's first person narrator. On the other hand, said narrator spends a lot more time looking at art than nature. Yes, thematic responses to past and recent history have been woven all through, and this continues and expands on that -- but it's nature that provokes the grandest passages, the ones that I most responded to this time through. Good stuff, overall -- and yet. I do wonder whether this work is the best introduction to either High Romanticism or the Byronic Hero.
Poems on Travel, ed. R. M. Leonard, dipped into because I wanted more travelogue poems (see previous). Much excellent stuff, including some new discoveries yay, although most of the selections ended up being descriptions of a place that happens to have been traveled to, rather than about the journey. This is in common with every other anthology of travel verse I've read, including my closest-to-gold standard, Kevin Crossley-Holland's Oxford Book of Travel Verse, so it can be argued it's part of the genre. If this isn't a barrier to you (ETA: nor the limitation to western Europe), this is a decent free anthology on the theme. (If you want an anthology that's just poems describing places, there's also Poems of Places, but that's much, much longer.)
In progress/continuing:
The Englishman in Italy, ed. George Wollaston, a 1909 anthology from Oxford University Press (oh ho!). A little heavy on Unification politics (which still weighed heavily on the mind and this is, after all, a collection about poets' responses to the country) but overall there's still a good selection of both travel poems and descriptions of places. Am ~1/3 through.
Plus more of World of Cultivation -- I wanted something mindless, and this fit the bill; I'm not even sure where the adventure is pointing these days, but the plethorizing of magic-systematics is entertaining enough -- and Way of Choices.
* Who wasn't even mentioned the second half of Canto 3.
---L.
Subject quote in honor of “The Farthest Shore” from “Christus: A Mystery,” Part III: The New England Tragedies, Act I, Henry Longfellow.
Finished since last report:
The Tombs of Atuan and The Farthest Shore, Ursula K. Le Guin -- vacation reading, and Janni had dibs on A Wizard of Earthsea. It's always nice to return to formative books and remember that they are, in fact, Very Good. I still don't think the tension in Shore between the teen POV needed for a YA and the continuing adventures of a now middle-aged series protagonist is balanced entirely effectively. (It is telling that, in my teenage attempt to write a fantasy by filing off the serial numbers of Shore, I aged not!Ged down considerably.) But even with the shortcomings that Le Guin tried to later rectify, she is very wise, and these are still wonderful books.
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, The Byron. I'm torn. On the one hand, Canto 4 has a lot of the best pure poetry of the whole hodgepodge, plus the Harold character* is finally dropped leaving just The Byron's first person narrator. On the other hand, said narrator spends a lot more time looking at art than nature. Yes, thematic responses to past and recent history have been woven all through, and this continues and expands on that -- but it's nature that provokes the grandest passages, the ones that I most responded to this time through. Good stuff, overall -- and yet. I do wonder whether this work is the best introduction to either High Romanticism or the Byronic Hero.
Poems on Travel, ed. R. M. Leonard, dipped into because I wanted more travelogue poems (see previous). Much excellent stuff, including some new discoveries yay, although most of the selections ended up being descriptions of a place that happens to have been traveled to, rather than about the journey. This is in common with every other anthology of travel verse I've read, including my closest-to-gold standard, Kevin Crossley-Holland's Oxford Book of Travel Verse, so it can be argued it's part of the genre. If this isn't a barrier to you (ETA: nor the limitation to western Europe), this is a decent free anthology on the theme. (If you want an anthology that's just poems describing places, there's also Poems of Places, but that's much, much longer.)
In progress/continuing:
The Englishman in Italy, ed. George Wollaston, a 1909 anthology from Oxford University Press (oh ho!). A little heavy on Unification politics (which still weighed heavily on the mind and this is, after all, a collection about poets' responses to the country) but overall there's still a good selection of both travel poems and descriptions of places. Am ~1/3 through.
Plus more of World of Cultivation -- I wanted something mindless, and this fit the bill; I'm not even sure where the adventure is pointing these days, but the plethorizing of magic-systematics is entertaining enough -- and Way of Choices.
* Who wasn't even mentioned the second half of Canto 3.
---L.
Subject quote in honor of “The Farthest Shore” from “Christus: A Mystery,” Part III: The New England Tragedies, Act I, Henry Longfellow.