Reading Life: 8th June 2018
Posted 8th June 2018
Category: Reading Life Genres: N/A
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As you’ll have seen, I finished Lennox’s The Female Quixote, and wrote the review. Throughout my blogging years I’ve often found myself floundering when it comes to writing reviews of books I have taken a lot of notes for; it’s most often led to me not completing the review; but this time, I did it. I wrote a basic plan and then made it more detailed until it was practically written. I will be trying out that method again in future.
Having started reading around the subjects of the book, I ended up going down an internet rabbit hole and searching through digital copies of 1700s literary magazines for information required to write this post. Many issues of Samuel Johnson’s The Gentleman’s Magazine still exist, which as it turned out not only included Johnson’s blurb for the book and Henry Fielding’s brief views, but the month in which Lennox’s book was published. After two hours searching through the editions for the correct information, finding the month of publication was an added bonus. I may have celebrated with coffee.
Having finished all the research, I’ve moved on to Frances Burney, which also sent me on a search for information, this time in view of Austen’s usage of ‘pride and prejudice’, which is believed to be taken from Burney’s Cecilia:
Remember: if to pride and prejudice you owe your miseries, so wonderfully is good and evil balanced, that to pride and prejudice you will also owe their termination.
I’m reading Evelina and getting back into Valeria Luiselli’s Faces In The Crowd which has turned from ‘simply’ meta to ‘a book in a book in a book maybe in a book maybe reality’… yes, it requires a lot of attention. I’m also reading The Peace Machine, a steampunk-esque Turkish novel set in the 1800s, and so far so good. It’s about a Turkish erotic novelist, who publishes under a pseudonym in France. The first couple of chapters covered his childhood during which he was living in poverty, before he saved a rich man’s life and being adopted. The blurb speaks of WWI and the fictional creation of a machine, which reviews online mention can create peace but at an ethical loss. The translation is excellent – the translator has chosen to keep the rhymes of the fragments of poetry that are scattered about so that whilst the words may by necessity be changed, the concept carries over completely.
Lastly, I spent a lovely Wednesday lunchtime with a group of writers, most local but a few from as far as Devon, and a diverse selection of genres. It was interesting hearing about marketing and publication from an author’s perspective, as well as the writing process. They are, from left to right (excuse the awful photo – mine): Rosie Travers, Sue Fortin, Carol Thomas, Charlie Cochrane, Lyn Lile (May Raymond), Liv Thomas (writes as Isabella Connor together with Val Olteanu), and Rosemary Smith.
On a completely different note, given the Twitter-trending Love Island and Big Brother-esque set up of many discussions and challenges but nothing otherwise to do I would like to ask you: how long do you think you could leave reading behind before you’d need to return? (I reckon I could go without reading for a month fairly easily but I’d want to leave from then on.)
June 10, 2018, 9:19 am
A month?! I doubt I would last a week! Reading is my main way to relax, particularly before bed, so I would be a stressed, sleepless mess after only a few days.
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June 10, 2018, 3:37 am
My recollection from my college years is that if I go a few days without reading for pleasure, I get a headache that slowly worsens until I get back to leisure reading. So….I would not last long at all.
The Peace Machine sounds incredible and right up my alley and I need to read it sooner than later. Holy crap. It sounds good in every way.