Reading Wednesday
Jun. 14th, 2017 08:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yuuagoLast finished: Land of Love and Ruins by Oddný Eir. ...I didn't like it. I'm having a difficult time figuring out WHY I didn't like it. What drew me to it was the format - I flipped through it in the library and found that it was just atypical enough to pique my interest; it's written somewhat as a diary, or internal musings, perhaps. But I found myself struggling to stay interested in it. A lack of interest in the narrator and her story, I suppose, maybe.
Currrently reading: Embers: One Ojibway's Meditations by Richard Wagamese. This is one that I saw in the bookstore, considered buying because I love the author's other works, and then decided to try the library's copy instead. It's very what-it-says-on-the-tin, a series of brief personal meditations on the subject of - well, everything. Existence in general. Wagamese has quite a way with words, and it shows here just as well as it does in his poetry. It's taking me a while to get through this one because I prefer to avoid reading big chunks of it all at once. It's better when taken one page at a time. (Ideally, perhaps, one page per day, though there aren't 365 of them.)
Also reading: Loon: Memory, Meaning, and Reality in a Northern Dene Community by Henry S. Sharp. This one is... I'm finding it interesting, but rather difficult to follow at times. The writer draws on a lot of metaphors from quantum mechanics in order to describe things like the Dene perception of time, reality, events, and existence, and it's... a little outside my field. But I do find it interesting, even if I don't expect the quantum bits will contribute much to my understanding of knowledge/power/inkoze as a concept, heh.
Reading next: I have no clue. According to the reading goals I've set, I need to read... uh... more books that I own, rather than library stuff. Fair enough. All things considered, I should read all of the books that I bought last time I went on vacation, because I have zero doubts that the next time I go to Victoria, I'll come back with more. So... it'll probably be one of these:
-Arctis, William Heinesen. Faeroese poet; this one looks like a very landscape-focused volume.
-Circling North, Charles Lillard. Canadian poet. I don't know anything about his work.
-Forge, Jan Zwicky. Canadian poet. Several of the works in this volume are music-influenced. ...I confess, part of the reason I bought this is because I love the way the book was designed; Gaspereau Press puts out such pretty volumes, especially for poetry. (And now I suddenly miss Nova Scotia again, oh dear.)
-What the Bear Said: Skald Tales of New Iceland, W. D. Valgardson. Canadian writer of Icelandic descent. Short stories influenced by Icelandic tradition (or reconstruction of handed-down stories? Not sure).
-Scars, W. P. Kinsella. Short stories set in Hobbema (near Edmonton).
Currrently reading: Embers: One Ojibway's Meditations by Richard Wagamese. This is one that I saw in the bookstore, considered buying because I love the author's other works, and then decided to try the library's copy instead. It's very what-it-says-on-the-tin, a series of brief personal meditations on the subject of - well, everything. Existence in general. Wagamese has quite a way with words, and it shows here just as well as it does in his poetry. It's taking me a while to get through this one because I prefer to avoid reading big chunks of it all at once. It's better when taken one page at a time. (Ideally, perhaps, one page per day, though there aren't 365 of them.)
Also reading: Loon: Memory, Meaning, and Reality in a Northern Dene Community by Henry S. Sharp. This one is... I'm finding it interesting, but rather difficult to follow at times. The writer draws on a lot of metaphors from quantum mechanics in order to describe things like the Dene perception of time, reality, events, and existence, and it's... a little outside my field. But I do find it interesting, even if I don't expect the quantum bits will contribute much to my understanding of knowledge/power/inkoze as a concept, heh.
Reading next: I have no clue. According to the reading goals I've set, I need to read... uh... more books that I own, rather than library stuff. Fair enough. All things considered, I should read all of the books that I bought last time I went on vacation, because I have zero doubts that the next time I go to Victoria, I'll come back with more. So... it'll probably be one of these:
-Arctis, William Heinesen. Faeroese poet; this one looks like a very landscape-focused volume.
-Circling North, Charles Lillard. Canadian poet. I don't know anything about his work.
-Forge, Jan Zwicky. Canadian poet. Several of the works in this volume are music-influenced. ...I confess, part of the reason I bought this is because I love the way the book was designed; Gaspereau Press puts out such pretty volumes, especially for poetry. (And now I suddenly miss Nova Scotia again, oh dear.)
-What the Bear Said: Skald Tales of New Iceland, W. D. Valgardson. Canadian writer of Icelandic descent. Short stories influenced by Icelandic tradition (or reconstruction of handed-down stories? Not sure).
-Scars, W. P. Kinsella. Short stories set in Hobbema (near Edmonton).
Yuu. Fic writer & book lover. M/Canada.
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Date: 2017-06-15 08:29 am (UTC)LK
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Date: 2017-06-15 12:15 pm (UTC)There is something comforting about works set in the north. It's because, wow, finally something that aligns with my experience of geographical reality. It's something that matches the way I perceive the world, and it's actually really hard to find work like that. Even most Canadian literature is set in a place that I can't connect with at all - big cities down south, mainly.... I'm so grateful that Nordic literature is trendy now, because it wasn't until I read something (I think it might have been Let the Right One In) that lingered on things like the impenetrable melancholy darkness of winter that I realized, oh man, this is what I've been missing, this is what I've wanted to read about for a very long time. Not the stuff set further south, which might as well have been on another planet.
So, yeah, it isn't escapism exactly... except maybe escaping from other literature and into a world that I can actually understand. I guess I read so much stuff like this because I spent so many years starved for it.
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Date: 2017-06-16 10:15 am (UTC)Strangely enough, the one writer that I feel sees the world in a similar way as I do is William Gibson, and he writes futuristic sci-fi, so whatever I relate to in his writing is really subtle, and certainly not geographic. ... or is it? Does it mean I feel estranged from my own home, like it's a foreign place that I never really belonged to? HMM. (He writes about misfits and talented fuck-ups a lot, so there's that.)
LK
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Date: 2017-06-19 02:07 pm (UTC)