Wednesday, February 13, 2013

reading Wednesday 2/13

Reading Wednesday! Holy shit, nearly forgot.

What are you reading now?
I haven't reread any of Isak Dinesen's story collections in years and years -- seriously, maybe a decade? -- although I often reread Out of Africa (hey, Carson McCullers reread it every year), so I decided on Winter's Tales. I had forgotten "The Sailor-Boy's Tale" is in it -- the first Dinesen story I ever read, as a teenager, in some gigantic Stories of the World anthology, and what made me track down her books originally. It is just as fantastic as ever.

The bewildered boy began to stammer his thanks to her. "Wait," said she, "I shall make you a cup of coffee, to bring back your wits, while I wash your jacket." She went and rattled an old copper kettle upon the fireplace. After a while she handed him a hot, strong, black drink in a cup without a handle to it. "You have drunk with Sunniva now," she said; "you have drunk down a little wisdom, so that in the future all your thoughts shall not fall like raindrops into the salt sea."

 What did you just finish reading?
Mad Girl's Love Song, which was terrible; American Isis, which was slightly better, but hampered like all the would-be Plath biographies by the writer's inability to quote from her work without permission from the Estate; The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which seemed less awful than a lot of my friends thought it was, but wasn't that great, either. (Someone wryly called it "The Harry Potter of science writing," which....yeah, pretty much.) Was immensely put off by the writer's website bragging how she began publicizing the book eight years before it was even published, which I guess paid off for her, but EIGHT YEARS? In all that time you could have written two or maybe even three much better books. But you wouldn't have the fame and money and Oprah deal, which is what matters in our culture. A much better, less personalized and less patronizing book on cross-cultural misunderstandings in medicine is The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down, which I recommend without reservation to everyone.

What do you expect to read next?
I want to read more fiction -- still -- maybe Seven Gothic Tales, or The Matisse Stories, or Vampires in the Lemon Grove. I did just get two nonfiction collections by Katha Pollitt for my Kindle, tho, so I might not be able to kick nonfiction just yet.