#recovering reader

[siena-sevenwits]

Guys, I very much hate to say it, but as I have been limiting my phone use and leaving it somewhere I can’t access it… I can read any physical book with interest right now. At least all the ones from my shelves. So it is a self-selected bunch of books, but… I can really get into them in a sustained way.

[siena-sevenwits]

Just started reading Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World (about his time on one of the Antarctic expeditions with Scott), and I have to say - his narrative voice is so warm, so human, so very focused from the first on friendship. He’s very wistful writing about this time as something that happened before the Great War, and seems to think the world’s attitude has changed so much since the war that the expedition could not have happened in the same way at the time of his writing. I think I am going to enjoy my time with this book, even though I have been promised a very bad time indeed.

[siena-sevenwits]

“Murder Comes First” has some stylistic flaws and isn’t great at characterization. It remains to be seen how well it will succeed on the plot front. But it is rekindling my need to read golden age mysteries. It’s dearly familiar ground, just not done as well as it could be. I need to read a strong mystery or two next, I think.

[siena-sevenwits]

Have borrowed Strong Poison and Have His Carcase from my sister.

[siena-sevenwits]

Good news, everyone! Cherry’s done for now. While there are anecdotes I might still find myself eager to tell, and will if the whim takes me, I have new books on the go, and frankly need to recover from the second half of Wheeler’s biography. (Sad and frightening in such a mundane, could-happen-to-your-loved-ones way.)

So now I have started a children’s novel inspired by the friendship between Mary, Queen of Scots and her female jester, La Jardiniere. I also mean to read a social history of the fog in London, which I picked up in that compelling bookshop last week.

[siena-sevenwits]

Mutuals and dear followers,

One of the best reading years I’ve had in some time was a couple of years ago when I read mainly from friends’ recs. I know this kind of thing burns some people, but I guess I know how to approach it in a way that works for me. I want to do something similar this year.

What books should I at least put on my radar that you've loved?

[siena-sevenwits]

🍒🌨️Cherry is clearly at pains to write with clarity and respectability (he notes that after an education at Winchester and a degree in Modern History at Oxford, he is finally starting his schooling and learning a little about writing - "My own writing is my own despair, but it is better than it was, and this is directly due to Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Shaw." [!] ) However, he's also at pains to give us a sense of how it really was, and this includes the slang. I cannot quite work out if calling an assistant a "snotty" may be put down as ship's lingo, academics' lingo, a general period-ism, or leftover school slang, but he cracks me up every time he describes himself as such in the middle of an otherwise very serious and proper sentence.

Tangentially, I am delighted to know Cherry's a Winchester boy, and thus would not only know all the "notions" (slang) in the Winchester School Word Book which delighted me so much last year, but would have been made to sit a mock exam on it in his first term.

"How about that cocoa?" says Campbell. Cocoa is a useful thing in the morning watch, and Gran, who used to be Campbell's snotty, and whose English was not then perfect, said he was glad of a change because he "did not like being turned into a drumstick" (he meant a domestic). I am going to start saying I don't want to be turned into a drumstick whenever anyone asks me to do something I'm not in the mood for.

[siena-sevenwits]

Cherry's now telling me a little history of antarctic expeditions prior to his journey with Scott, so that I'll know what he's talking about if he ever needs to reference something his exploratory forebears did. I thought this part might take some getting through. It does not. Cherry's so very eager to tell the most interesting, exciting, and innovative bits, and he's so bursting with with love for them all, even for Captain Cook, who must have felt as faraway to him as Cook does to us.

Some people aren't a bit like the way they write, but I hope Cherry was, just based on the little I've seen. Even writing an introduction, he just feels like he's pressing a cup of tea into your hand and beaming at you (and wrapping you up in a quilt, because goodness, it's cold.)