Ruthanna Emrys's Journal

I'm posting from the Psychonomics hotel in Houston, because I can and because I don't have any 8 AM talks for once. The ability to sleep in is mitigated by the likely inability to eat lunch until 3:45 PM. I got in too late to catch the poster session tonight, but had dinner with the current students in my graduate lab. We went to a restaurant with an aquarium in the middle, and memory-geeked over seafood.

The next classics review would be Treasure Island. I don't have nearly as much to say about this as I did about Frankenstein. I enjoyed it--as a recent Evil Editor comment said, "you had me at 'pirate treasure.'" But...

( Spoilers ahoy, mateys! )
Next up ought to be Gilgamesh, but since I try to avoid taking library books on planes I've got my own copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn instead. So far my reactions are a battle between delighted laughter and severe queasiness. More on that after I finish the book. And after that, I'm not reading Gilgamesh, because I'm really going to need something with girls in.

I've been meaning to do this for a while. Like a lot of people, I had to read a certain portion of the classics canon in high school. I had a decent teacher, so I liked several of the things that I read, and was capable of explaining at length why I disliked most of the things I didn't. And then I got out of high school. Since then, I have mostly settled into the SF/F genre, with very occasional forays based on recommendations, or favorite authors writing historicals. This has never stopped me from dissing on Dickens, when the subject arises. But occasionally I wonder whether Ashni-at-31 should actually be cavalierly passing on the opinions of Ashni-at-17. It's been a while, after all, and I've changed. I have social skills now. And I like people, most of the time. These are probably things that influence one's interpretation of A Tale of Two Cities.

So, I'm going to go back and read some classics. Because I'm no longer in high school, because I have a job, and because my ability to enjoy reading any given book is heavily mood-dependent, this will be less than systematic. I have a set of rules, which I'm going to break as I please.
( Read More )
( Not actually a book meme, just looks like one. )
Wish me luck.