WWW Wednesday. This meme is from shouldbereading.
To play along, just answer the following three (3) questions…
• What are you currently reading?
• What did you recently finish reading?
• What do you think you’ll read next?
• What are you currently reading?
I just finished rereading Bunker Bean and plan to reread Ruggles of Red Gap, both by Harry Leon Wilson, and I’m reading Tish by Mary Roberts Rhinehart. To my shock I have realized that these books are literally one hundred years old. My copies are first editions.
This forces me to recognize that I am, in spite of a certain raunchy rowdiness when the moon is full, one of those old farts who read hundred year old novels and relish their grace, their command of English, and their depiction of a slower and more mannered time than our own.
Old fart. Holy crap, Jennifer.
This cover is the edition I own. But click this picture to get it free at Amazon in Kindle! I just snapped up MORE TISH as well!
Currently I’m reading aloud to my husband a series of longish serial stories written by Mary Roberts Rhinehart. The collection is called Tish, after the central character. Three maiden ladies between forty-five and fifty are lifelong friends. They have adventures generaled by Tish, the oldest and most fearless of the three, narrated by Lizzie, the most cynical, with pratfalls and soppy sentiment provided by Aggie.
I can’t get enough of the offhand way in which Lizzie reports, for example, that they were late to a wedding because their car broke through a bridge–it was quite a small bridge–and there was some trouble with a man who was fishing under the bridge who claimed that the falling car broke his arm, although Lizzie distinctly saw him move it. The three of them managed to pull the machine out, and were spared a lawsuit from the irate fisherman because Tish had had the forethought to remove the number plates. But Aggie’s feet were wet through and she wouldn’t go to church until she had changed her shoes. (I’m paraphrasing from memory.)
I want to be Tish when I grow up. Heck, I’d settle for being Aggie.
• What did you recently finish reading?
Also free–click here.
Bunker Bean is about a mild-mannered young man who blunders his way into fortune and the love of a millionaire’s daughter. Bean has the soul of an artist without any of an artist’s confidence in his own voice. He worships beauty in a hopeless, utterly detached way: a seashell, a bull terrier puppy, a necktie, a young woman he sees as so far above him that, even while she is courting him, rope and hogtie, he fantasizes that she is flirting with him to score off her “real” fiancé. It takes him nearly to the end of the book to realize how he loves her, and to take possession of his own power and responsibility. This is a theme with Wilson: taking one’s own power. Ruggles uses it, too, as well as a less successful novel called Oh, Doctor!
• What do you think you’ll read next?
Also free! click here.
Ruggles of Red Gap has been made into a movie, although sadly I haven’t seen it—have you? The title character is the valet of the disreputable younger brother of an English earl. This remittance man loses Ruggles to a rich American in a poker game in Paris. Ruggles is carried back to Red Gap, Washington, there to associate with persons who, in his immortal phrase,”would never do with us.” Like Bean, Ruggles misunderstands much of what he sees and hears, and nevertheless manages to achieve heroic marvels.
What about you? What are you reading, have you been reading, wanting to read next?