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Seven years ago on this day the heavens opened and a month's worth of rain fell on TO in the course of a few hours. This isn't the first time it's monsooned on the anniversary, but it kindly hasn't done it for a few years, so today's storm was a bit unquiet-making. It went in for the extreme winds rather than the wet, though there was a lot of wet, even if Environ Canada calls it 'rain showers'. Showers as in 'full force from the nozzle', maybe. Lights flickered but fortunately didn't go out. Temps dropped from 32 to 24 for maybe 90 minutes, then bounced right back again. Thus this summer.
I zipped through almost all of Judge Dee in a little over a week and now must give him a break because I have a substantial library book on the go (Rena Barron's Kingdom of Souls) and another waiting for me (Goudge's The Little White Horse) though I won't be getting that one until next week because the first slot for curbside pickup was Tuesday next. I wonder what the other Aged do to arrange pickups, because the pickup app won't register on my outdated desktop's OS. There's a bookmobile service that will bring books to the door, or at least there was before this started. Presumably also the Aged have children or grandchildren with laptops and cell phones who do it for them.
Before the Barron arrived I'd started on Karen Lord's newest, which gives me the oddest frisson of Gladstone's Three Parts Dead. Very random things will remind me of Gladstone, which is fine because Three Parts Dead is one of my favourites. I'd like to get back to Lord, but can't read it in tandem with anything else because it would be like smoking while eating an omelette aux fines herbes.
Otherwise there's still Tristram Shandy for will-less couch reading, which as I feared is not as entertaining as I thought it in my twenties. The Net curtails one's patience in a horrible fashion. 'Oh get *on* with it,' I mutter, as Sterne goes wittering on forever. I know, I know, there's no it to be got on with. But Sterne sounds so very much like all those blokes who have no idea how not funny their funny stories are. Am ready to bet Rabelais and Cervantes are just as tedious and bumptious. And what's always puzzled me is that these thumping great tomes, longer than any fantasy trilogy, were written by hand in either candle- or daylight, and read the same way. The premodern era: that thought it entertaining to read long long loooooong novels in cold rooms in the dark, ce qui est une grande preuve de la mélancolie de vivre.
I zipped through almost all of Judge Dee in a little over a week and now must give him a break because I have a substantial library book on the go (Rena Barron's Kingdom of Souls) and another waiting for me (Goudge's The Little White Horse) though I won't be getting that one until next week because the first slot for curbside pickup was Tuesday next. I wonder what the other Aged do to arrange pickups, because the pickup app won't register on my outdated desktop's OS. There's a bookmobile service that will bring books to the door, or at least there was before this started. Presumably also the Aged have children or grandchildren with laptops and cell phones who do it for them.
Before the Barron arrived I'd started on Karen Lord's newest, which gives me the oddest frisson of Gladstone's Three Parts Dead. Very random things will remind me of Gladstone, which is fine because Three Parts Dead is one of my favourites. I'd like to get back to Lord, but can't read it in tandem with anything else because it would be like smoking while eating an omelette aux fines herbes.
Otherwise there's still Tristram Shandy for will-less couch reading, which as I feared is not as entertaining as I thought it in my twenties. The Net curtails one's patience in a horrible fashion. 'Oh get *on* with it,' I mutter, as Sterne goes wittering on forever. I know, I know, there's no it to be got on with. But Sterne sounds so very much like all those blokes who have no idea how not funny their funny stories are. Am ready to bet Rabelais and Cervantes are just as tedious and bumptious. And what's always puzzled me is that these thumping great tomes, longer than any fantasy trilogy, were written by hand in either candle- or daylight, and read the same way. The premodern era: that thought it entertaining to read long long loooooong novels in cold rooms in the dark, ce qui est une grande preuve de la mélancolie de vivre.
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Hah, I love that way of putting it!
Aww I did love Cervantes. But I did also have to beaver through him for college classes for nearly all of one summer, so I was kind of doing it like a marathon. Rabelais was a trip, altho I don't remember now if the Penguin classic version abridges him....it certainly didn't censor some parts! Some of it was like a very slantwise G-rated version of some of de Sade, if that makes sense. IDK. I believe I read the 1986 revised version of Smollett's translation -- I have the newer one by Edith Grossman, but didn't read it yet. ("New," it came out in 2005. Hi ho.)
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Ok, maybe Cervantes isn't one of The Boiz. I do have Quixote around here, and might even read him in my quarantined retirement, but I'm reading all of Montaigne first because I know I like him.
(Just after I started uni in the late 60s UofT scrapped their old program English Lang and Lit, that my cousin graduated from. She said someone in her year figured out that if you read the prescribed texts and only one piece of criticism on each, you'd finish reading everything five years after you graduated. This gave me a profound distrust of The Canon ever after. Buncha guys who didn't know when to stop talking, basically.)
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Yeah, I was finding it hard to do those big long reads even 10 years or so ago -- there was a reading Genji group on LJ, and I don't think any of us ever finished it. What a shame. Someone (a dude natch) very loudly started a Proust readthrough on Goodreads (OF ALL PLACES) a while back, and got a fair amount of attention for it, and that fizzled too. (Although Proust reviews in gifs might be interesting.)
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Proust, argh. Not even a reading group with reviews in gifs and the newer translation could get me to wade through him again. A Chinese reader once referred to the uhh protagonist of Red Chambers as 'that horrid little boy' (and oh yes wasn't he). One can say the same of Narrator Marcel. Head *out* of asshole, Marcel/ Baoyu .
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