Robert (gurdonark) wrote,
Robert
gurdonark

change of form change of novel

I finished reading William Dean Howells' first novel, "Their Wedding Journey". I took a very long time finishing this novel--since September 9. That works out to an average of 10 pages a week or so for the first half of the novel, and 40 pages in 4 sessions over a week for the remainder of the novel. The difference was that I read the second half of the novel on the small netbook. This form factor seems to work better for reading than a laptop. So far my old-netbook-as-tablet replacement idea is working. I hope this keeps my pace for reading at a steady pace. I do not mind taking a book slowly, but I want to return to finishing more books more quickly. 

Sunday and Monday were pretty darn cold. I got in my steps, and watched a lot of birds each day. But I am eager for a bit of warmer weather. Fortunately, this is on tap soon.

I bought and downloaded Spencer Ellsworth's "StarFire: Memory's Blade". I am looking forward to this one. I enjoyed the first two novels, which each took a few days to finish. I miss, a bit, the old days when I rolled through paperback novels at breakneck speed.

"Their Wedding Journey" was a good read with some flaws. I liked its narrative device of narrating a wedding journey in the 19th Century. I liked the protagonists. This look at tourism in an earlier era intrigued me. Though Howells was known as a kind of Christian socialist and advocate for some egalitarian ideas, some of the narrative fails to meet the standard of being progressive at all, and instead relies on problematic ethnic or gender stereotypes. I wonder if a novel about travel is particularly vulnerable to this problem, as part of any travel guide is the drama of "the other". The book's characters travel from Boston to New York to Rochester to Buffalo to Niagara Falls to Montreal to Quebec and back again, all without planes or automobiles. I'd like to take that trip on by train and boat,if not quite by horse cart in New York City.

I got a lot done at work today. I hope to get more done the rest of this week.





from Dreamwidth, because two posts of the same text are twice as nice
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