Coffee and Books (reading post)

[radiantfracture]

I accidentally cracked my coffee press while washing it (moral: never wash your dishes), so before yesterday's accidental omnibus meeting, I walked down to the second-nearest local coffee shop and bought a pourover apparatus. Hipsterdom circa 2011 here I come. I also bought a cup of coffee to tide me over.

I am not wholly convinced by the results of my first pourover, but I'm committed now.

Reading

I just re-read The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden, a comfort read for its luminous intensity. Although I usually read it as a sort of sensory reverie, this time I was much more attuned to the movements of the plot and the geometries of desire, which were crueller than I had remembered.

I haven't read any other Rumer Godden books -- should I? I tend to look for books of the same flavour rather than books by the same author.

On the family visit, I collected a copy of Grace Paley's Enormous Changes at the Last Minute my mother kindly ordered for me. I haven't finished all the stories, but I devoured several. These are a little grimmer than I expected from her other collections. I expected -- because it's what I love in her -- that politicized slapstick domestic surrealism she does so well, but these were -- well, also crueller. Perhaps better for that? I'm not sure yet, because I was surprised.

In theory and in practice (wa ha ha) I've been reading through Cruising Utopia of course, and have read a few of the short essays in Mark Fisher's The Weird and the Eerie, which I think I'll discuss here next, unless there's hard lobbying for The Ghosts of My Life. There is some talk of taking up a further theory reading project with the copper bracelet crew, which would please me.

I'm re-reading This is How You Lose the Time War preparatory to teaching it. My brother also read it, and I think I have coerced him into making a video about the math and science therein. (He's the family mathematician, and also the family gamer, and he pointed out a possible connection to Halo, for which I am infinitely grateful.)

Oh yeah, and I'm almost finished The Starless Sea, which is propped up in a book stand on my kitchen counter so I can read a few pages each morning with my now-pourover coffee, like the newspaper from fairyland.

{rf}

Comments

[radiantfracture]

I would also say nunnery, or convent.

Do you know Sylvia Townsend Warner's /The Corner that Held Them/, also an excellent book about a nunnery (or convent)? I like it very much.

I think I've neglected Rumer Godden. Thank you!

[yhlee]

Ah! "Convent" was the word used in the book. Thank you.

I don't think I've read Sylvia Townsend Warner, but someday I should rectify this!

[oursin]

I was just digging into my posts on works of convent-fiction because I remembered 'there was that book that really had the same feel as The Corner that Held Them' and then I realised it was actually Susan Stinson's Spider in a Tree, which is about Rev Jonathan Edwards in Northampton, MA in the early C18th, in a similar small inward-looking religious community.

[sovay]

I don't think I've read Sylvia Townsend Warner, but someday I should rectify this!

Seconding Sylvia Townsend Warner in general, but also The Corner That Held Them. It is not my favorite book of hers, but that is because I really love some others. [edit] Kingdoms of Elfin (1977) and The Flint Anchor (1954), specifically.