wednesday books are sibylline

[landofnowhere]

Princess Napraxine, Ouida. Exciting plot developments, and I am now very very concerned on behalf of a certain character in advance of the final book club installment. (Will be writing more when the next readalong post goes up chez lunabee34.)

As You Like It, Shakespeare. Play readaloud. This play no longer holds any surprises for me, but it's still delightful fluff with some depth!

The Sibyl in Her Grave, Sarah Caudwell. I needed a book for a 5-hour plane trip, and this did an excellent job of filling the time. I'm glad I was warned this was darker than the other Hilary Tamar books, but it is also very well-plotted with multiple layers of misdirection. (Also, the new cover does not live up to the Edward Gorey glory of the original cover.)

The Way of Kings and Words of Radiance, Brandon Sanderson. Continuing along with these though I am very much not going to catch up before book 5 comes out next week (especially as I did not take Words of Radiance along on Thanksgiving travel). I still really like the start of Words of Radiance, and hope it keeps up (though I know I'll be getting another regularly scheduled installment of Kaladin angst.)

The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt. For people who haven't heard this recommended/reviewed already, this is a literary novel about an American-born, Oxford-educated, graduate school drop out single mom and her son, who is a polyglot prodigy à la John Stuart Mill. I'm about 2/3 of the way through, and I can tell that this book is trying to do something ambitious, but I'm not really sure where it's going and what the payoff will be. I am however very much enjoying the language.

Comments

[landingtree]

My dad read me The Last Samurai while homeschooling me and my sister, I remember him taking great satisfaction in the scene where Sibylla is aghast at a schoolteacher!

Also, since I last read it, I have seen Seven Samurai, and am looking forward to rereading it at some point with that context.

[landofnowhere]

I wish I'd read The Last Samurai when it came out during my early teens -- I think I would have taken similar satisfaction in that scene! I hope that I would have come out of it inspired rather than feeling like my early childhood had been wasted since I attended school until I was 8 and didn't start learning Greek until age 12 :-) (though the bigger problem with my Greek is that I didn't stick with it).

I am not much of a movie person, but I am curious about Seven Samurai now!

[landingtree]

I don't believe we felt as though we'd wasted our childhoods, despite the percentage of our time homeschooling we spent sitting around reading fantasy novels! (We learned Latin for a long time, but not very effectively. We were compliant and unmotivated children, which puzzled our dad, because we'd do any task he set us with apparent happiness, but if he did not set us any tasks we would continue to read fantasy novels, and despite the ideal child-motivated learning he did think we should learn some other things).

I really liked Seven Samurai!

[landofnowhere]

I didn't mean to refer to the time spent homeschooling as the wasted time -- while some of it was wasted, a lot of it was well spent (including time reading fantasy novels)! I meant all the time I spent in school where I feel that I got not that much out for the hours put in.

I guess you didn't have the revised version which has an afterword that is a long rant about the education system (quoted in queenlua's excellent review), and which is probably shaping my take here.