My morning book is Tenderness, by Eve Tushnet. I love it, you guys. I love her voice, I love her thoughtfulness, it is helpful and challenging and fun to read. I will have more to say about this one, but if you have any interest in the question of how the Church can respond more pastorally to the gay community, this book is worth your time.
I am now three-sixteenths (but who's counting?) of the way through book 5 of the Palliser Chronicles, The Prime Minister. It's fine. It's not gripping, but, you know, it's Trollope. I am going to have to give him another twenty chapters before we have any hope of gripping.
By the numbers (i.e.., chapters completed), I am more than 80% of the way through Sketches by Boz. But by the page count, the proportion is much smaller. The last twelve sketches are much more substantial than the first 44, and I have bogged down. Perhaps I will knock it out during spring break. I had a funny experience reading this one in tandem with The Prime Minister, you guys. I hopped into bed and opened up my Kindle app to read my nightly chapter of The Prime Minister. At the beginning of a Trollope novel you're always meeting a bunch of new characters, and it's not unusual for him to introduce people in groups, where he has a plausible way to say, "Look, here's the crew we'll be talking about in this novel." So I nodded knowingly to myself when I saw that the chapter title. I pulled up short at the street name, which was Something-coram Court. I thought to myself, "Like Tattycoram in Little Dorrit. How often does that -coram bit show up in Victorian novels, I wonder?" I filed away the character's name for future reference, and then I observed to myself that he sounded decidedly odd for a Trollope character. I turned another page and read a little farther in increasing perplexity. "...Wait a minute," I said to myself, as I tapped my way to the book cover. Sure enough, this was a Dickensian gathering.
I guess this is a predictable hazard of reading two Victorian novels at the same time on the same device.
The Hardcore Dickens Club has gone on to Pickwick. They make it sound so enticing that I thought, "I could reread Pickwick with them! I love Pickwick!” But man, they are a committed lot. I think I will finish Sketches and then leave them to it until they hit Nicholas Nickleby.
Two of my library holds came in this week. I galloped through Black Girls Must Die Exhausted in a couple of days and put the sequel on hold as well. I'm not very far into The Maid but I predict it will be a quicker read than The Prime Minister. I have some baked-in skepticism about neurotypical people attempting to write from the perspective of characters on the spectrum, which seems to be what's going on here, but we shall see. (Did you read the Rosie books? I found them fun but also problematic. There was also some of that same thing in Eleanor Oliphant.)
I have also been inching my way through The Church's Best-Kept Secret, Mark Shea's book on Catholic social teaching. I really like it: clear, succinct, sensible, helpful. I'm going to aim to finish that one up by the end of spring break too.
As usual, these are Amazon links; if you click through and buy a book, Amazon will send me a few cents' worth of store credit.
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