dual personalities

What are you reading these days?

We recently returned from a trip to the beach, which means we have had a chance to dig in our heels (literally, in the sand — very exfoliating) and read some good books!

I continue to work my way through the Mitford series, which strike the perfect balance of easy-to-read and intellectually engaging. And they provide spiritual comfort to boot. For example, if you are having trouble sleeping, maybe you will enjoy this hymn that comes up in These High Green Hills:

Save us from troubled, restless sleep,
From all ill dreams Your children keep,
So calm our minds that fears may cease,
And rested bodies wake in peace.

— from “To You Before the Close of Day”

I also returned to the nineteenth century over our vacation. I had somehow managed to never read E. D. E. N. Southworth while getting my degree, so I remedied that by starting her most famous novel, The Hidden Hand. (P.S. I am a big fan of her name, which really is an acronym: her name was Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte before taking her husband’s name, Southworth.) This novel is a tangle of characters good and evil, adventure, suspense, and romance. I seriously can’t read it if I am already stressed out. I get too worked up!

I purchased the book on Amazon from one of those sellers who cheaply print open-source books, and the back has a spirited (if ill-written) blurb, by which I am overly amused. Please read the whole thing:

I plan to use the final line on all future course descriptions: “19th Century Literature really can rock if you let it!”

DN has been reading (as photographed above) Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. We both started them a couple years ago, and I gave up on book four. As he diagnosed, they’re bad to binge, which is what I was doing. I also lost patience with the characters, who are too “real” for my liking, which is to say they aren’t particularly good or admirable. They’re flawed and make mistakes. DN can take the reality, I guess. He says: the novels’ style feels mundane until, suddenly, the reader is hit with an epiphany, a moment when so many of the previous, seemingly quotidian details “pay off” with meaning–and then, just like in life, the moment recedes and the ordinary resumes.

We have not, however, made headway on our backlog of New Yorkers 😳